Tzvetan Mikov's Blog

The longer I use Git, the more things I find to love. Of course when I say "love", I don't mean the fanboy kind of love, but the feeling of satisfaction and happiness which good tools give the proud professional :-) I just recently realized how easy it is to apply an arbitrary commit on top of another one, without treating it as a patch. Since all high-level Git commands work with patches and diffs, one sometimes forgets that internally Git doesn't use patches, but simply stores the state of the tree as is at any point. So, to put commit-a on top of commit-b, I simply do:   git-checkout commit-a   git-read-tree -u -a commit-b Again, this doesn't apply commit-b as a patch on top of commit-a; it copies the exact state of the tree in commit-b. Why is this necessary? Sometimes there can be a very messy path from commit-a to commit-b, while all we want to record in the official history is just the two commits. After reading the Git user manual, the first i

Issue tracking is needed even for smaller projects or personal ones, but frequently the effort of setting up a complex issue tracking system for a small project is too much. A typical bug tracking system might requires a database server and a web server. Administering those is too much of a PITA. Another severe problem lies with the portability of the bug database. For my hobby or consulting projects I like to keep the bugs close to the source - I might happen to work om my desktop, on a laptop, etc. They should be easy to move around and archive. By comparison, moving or backing up a Bugzilla installation involves unspeakable complexities that my mind simply refuses to do.  (I do realize that it is not technically complex to move a Bugzilla installation, in fact it is a relatively easy as these things go,  but it is not something that one would undertake casually - it takes preparation, time and care). Yes, one could maintain a running publicly accessible (even only via SSh/OpenVP

Reading the replies to this comment (and the ones around it) in Slashdot, it is somewhat shocking to realize how short sighted  most posters are - considering these are Linux users, which we should assume means something. These people are content to reinstall their OS every six months and couldn't possibly imagine why one wouldn't want to, or why not all software in existence can be in their favorite distro's repository. The problem is not that these people exist, but that apparently they are the target audience of popular Linux desktop distributions. This worries me. At least with Windows you know that there is a "design committee" somewhere in Redmond, trying to do the right thing; they don't end up doing it, but they at least try to approach it intelligently. What am I saying - apparently they do succeed, and the proof is in the pudding - 98% of the desktop market share. Recently there were discussions in Slashdot about PulseAudio. The latest attempt