mercurial

Weekend task: Pull with Subversion

o_O

But I actually mean … figure out how to do the equivalent of a Mercurial/Git “Pull” on a Subversion branch :( I realize you can do it with a merge, but the process seems to be both messy and unreliable.

We have a whole bunch of branches running these days, and it’s getting messy, not least because Subversion “branches” are part of the repository file system and not part of the revision metadata.

Git: It *could* be harder.

Some time in the last two weeks, I pulled some code from somewhere, made some changes, and dispatched them to the author for review.

Then I scratched my head. I’d just used git.

‘Neato’.

Visual Source Safe to Subversion

For the last 10 odd years, the game’s data components have been kept in Visual Source Safe. VSS is bad, m’kay. Like any piece of software, it has its merits, especially for a very small team working on a very simple project. I’m not going to turn this into an anti-VSS pejorative tho.

Moving from VSS to Subversion (and then possibly Mercurial) varies in complexity depending on your repository. Ours is ten years old and contains multiple projects, which have danced around the directory tree.

Workin’ Mercurial

On Friday I used Mercurial‘s built-in repository conversion tool to build a Mercurial repository from Subversion 1.30 branch. Went home, cloned that to my Linux and Windows boxes and I’ve been tinkering over the weekend.

With the inotify extension, it’s really zipping under Linux; especially with atime changes disabled.

And I notice that I’m very quickly falling back into the habit of early commits.

The only bottleneck in the system is that the master repository is on a Windows Server 2003 share, and cloning/pulling/pushing are a little slow. I suspect that I need to look into setting up hgservice or something.

But if we do switch to Mercurial, I think we’ll probably set it up alongside Trac (which I increasingly dislike) or Redmine or something: Trac development seems somewhat bumbling, Redmine is generally nicer but it has rude rough edges – e.g. the forum system is kinda noddy. I will probably like Redmine more when I quit trying to integrate it to our Windows domain logins and use our game-database logins like we do with Trac right now.

Git: A review by a not-gonna-use-it-er

This is in response to Drave and Xiper’s questions about my nixing of Git as an option for a replacement version control system.

Git” is an incredibly popular distributed version control system originally developed by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. The fact that it is used by the Linux Kernel development team has given it a firmly established base in Linux development. Add in the “github” project hosting service and it has stealthed into the position of dominant “revision tool thingy” that RCS once held.

Mercurial” is another popular distributed version control system, lurking in the shadows.

So why did I nix Git and start looking more at Mercurial?

Thinking to 1.32

1.31 (or the lack thereof, as yet) has been almost as frustrating for us as it has for our players. It is likely to become known as the “if I’d known that” patch.

I’ve been wholly mired in cell host performance issues for a while, stuck in the maw of code that I really, really, really hate. Code that resists or springs a leak at every turn. It is the code that any sober refactorer would say rewrite to.

But it’s not just some subsystem, or some corner of code. It’s the fundamental basis for the cell host.