I usually yawn when the latest development “paradigm shift” rolls by. But there is a paradigm shift in source control software (software change management, software configuration management, source code management, version control system, revision control or whatever more “correct” term you want to use, geesh) with which I have fallen in love. In a word: distributed.

I am poking my toe in the ocean of mythtv development, and all I wanted to do was track my own changes along with the latest changes submitted by the main developers. Sounds totally basic, right? I traveled down a bit of a road though before I came to the best solution: git. Check out the git-for-open-source wiki article for the why and how. git fits like a glove.

Just as a teaser, here’s what you’ll end up with:

                   repo1
            mybranch<->master
           /                 \
public repo                   svn repo
           \                 /
            mybranch<->master
                   repo2

I’m not a fan of java, but I am a firm believer in using the right tool for the job. Eclipse CDT is turning out to be the IDE of choice these days. I’ll update this as I get deeper…

Nothing can touch gentoo when it comes to keeping an up-to-date linux system. It has the tools (emerge, dispatch-conf, elogviewer, etc.) to tell you what has changed since yesterday, get the changes, and integrate them into your system. linux is a crazy-assed pile of mismanaged bits that are freshly broken in a dozen ways every single day. Anybody that runs a linux system will…

  1. spend a not-insignificant amount of time keeping their system running; and…
  2. tell you they don’t.

It’s part of the whole cocky “look what I can do” competitiveness built into every geek. Go ahead, now it’s time for you to lie to me and tell me otherwise. 😛

My current strategy for staying on the back of the bucking linux bronco… (continued…)