use Perl

• Good times for VCS' (Score:2)

  by Dom2 (2981)

  You won't regret learning git. It's a fine solution to the problem of version control. But, we are blessed at the moment with many good version control tools. For all the complaints, subversion does work well. Mercurial is in heavy use by Sun for Solaris, OpenJDK, etc. Ubuntu are investing heavily in bzr. There's a lot of choice out there, and they're all pretty good (when compared to CVS, RCS and SCCS which came before).
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by wirebird (8007)

    Subversion and Mercurial sound about right for the suggestions he made. I think he uses Mercurial at the day job, and used to use subversion, and only objects to git as being something different he has to deal with. For simplicity, he likes to keep home and work using the same stuff wherever it makes sense to do so. (I can appreciate that... having worked a contract job in Delphi and a FOSS project in Perl for a year or two.)
    
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147)

      Git and Mercurial are actually pretty similar in use. In a surprising number of cases, the command to do something is called the same in both of them. [masukomi.org] And if he’s ever touching any free software repositories, he’ll have to learn at least a minimum of git sooner or later anyway. :-)
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by wirebird (8007)

        Oh, his complaint isn't about *using* any of them, it's about maintaining them on our servers. Particularly, maintaining more than one... likes to keep his package management stuff to a minimum, as one might expect.
        
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    Actually, for all its primitivity, SCCS wasn’t on the wrong track, at least according to the information I could find about how it worked.

    Even RCS is OK for single-user tracking of a handful of files in one directory. That may not sound like much – but it gets two things right: local repository instead of a server; and zero overhead for setting up a repository (not even a foo init). If someone wrote decent merging and push/pull support for it, it would actually not be bad at all.

    CVS is where
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dom2 (2981)

      Well, if you really want to investigate SCCS, you could poke at CSSC [sourceforge.net]. :-)

      Actually, OpenSolaris probably has a copy of the originals, but I can't find it after a quick look.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Aristotle (5147)

        I saw that before. I’d be interested in a short conceptual overview of the SCCS model, but not interested enough to put in the effort to deduce that from the software. :-)
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by chromatic (983)

      If I understand correctly, SCCS was one of the major inspirations for BitKeeper, as it was a major part of TeamWare.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Aristotle (5147)

        Yeah; this is the sort of fragmentary hint about SCCS of which I’ve picked up a couple, which lead me to say that my understanding is it was decent, if comparatively primitive. But I can’t say any more than that since I haven’t seen any substantial exposition of how it worked.
• m101-alikes (Score:1)

  by rjbs (4671)

  I bought a stockpile of m101's from eBay a few years ago, and it was a great decision. I use one at home, now, on my two Linux boxes, with a cheap USB-PS/2 adapter that works adequately (but not perfectly). I'm starting to think that I'll need to replace them, though, because they're *so* darn loud that I daren't used them while Martha is sleeping. I need to find a really nice clicky-feeling keyboard without the clicks.

  --
  rjbs