Category Archives: Programming

Review: Free Software Project Hosting

Programming, Reviews,

I asked for suggestions a few days ago. I got several good ones, and investigated them. You can find my original criteria at the link above. Here’s what I came up with:

Google Code

Its very simple interface appeals to me. It has an issue tracker, a wiki, a download area. But zero integration with git. That’s not necessarily a big problem; I can always keep on hosting git repos at git.complete.org. It is a bit annoying, though, since I wouldn’t get to nicely link commit messages to automatic issue closing.

A big requirement of mine is being able to upload tarballs or ZIP files from the command line in an automated fashion. I haven’t yet checked to see if Google Code exports an API for this. Google Code also has a lifetime limit of 25 project creations, though rumor has it they may lift the limit if you figure out where to ask and ask nicely.

URL: googlecode.com

Gitorious

Gitorious is one of the two Git-based sites that put a strong emphasis on community. Like Github, Gitorious tries to make it easy for developers to fork projects, submit pull requests to maintainers, and work together. This aspect of it does hold some appeal to me, though I have never worked with one of these sites, so I am somewhat unsure of how I would use it.

The downside of Gitorious or Github is that they tie me to Git. While I’m happy with Git and have no plans to change now, I’ve changed VCSs many times over the years when better tools show up; I’ve used, in approximately this order, CVS, Subversion, Arch/tla, baz, darcs, Mercurial, and Git, with a brief use of Perforce at a job that required it. I may use Git for another 3 years, but after 5 years will Git still be the best VCS out there? I don’t know.

Gitorious fails several of my requirements, though. It has no issue tracker and no downloads area.

It can spontaneously create a tar.gz file from the head of any branch, but not a zip file. It is possible to provide a download of a specific revision, but this is not very intuitive for the end user.

Potential workarounds include using Lighthouse for bug tracking (they do support git integration for changelog messages) and my own server to host tarballs and ZIP files — which I could trivially upload via scp.

URL: gitorious.org

Github

At first glance, this is a more-powerful version of Gitorious. It has similar community features, has a wiki, but adds an issue tracker, download area, home page capability, and a bunch of features. It has about a dozen pre-built commit hooks, that do everything from integrate with Lighthouse to pop commit notices into Jabber.

But there are surprising drawbacks, limitations, and even outright bugs all throughout. And it all starts with the user interface.

On the main project page, the user gets both a download button and a download tab. But they don’t do the same thing. Talk about confusing!

The download button will make a ZIP or tarball out of any tag in the repo. The download tab will also do the same, though presented in a different way; but the tab can also offer downloads for files that the maintainer has manually uploaded. Neither one lets you limit the set of tags presented, so if you have an old project with lots of checkpoints, the poor end user has to sift through hundreds of tags to find the desired version. It is possible to make a tarball out of a given branch, so a link to the latest revision could be easy, but still.

Even worse, there’s a long-standing issue where several of the tabs get hidden under other on-screen elements. The wiki tab, project administration tab, and sometimes even the download tab are impacted. It’s been open since February with no apparent fix.

And on top of that, uploading arbitrary tarballs requires — yes — Flash. Despite requests to make it scriptable, they reply that there is no option but Flash and they may make some other option sometime.

The issue tracker is nice and simple. But it doesn’t support attachments. So users can’t attach screenshots, debug logs, or diffs.

I really wanted to like Github. It has so many features for developers. But all these surprising limitations make it a pain both for developers (I keep having to “view source” to find the link to the wiki or the project admin page) and for users (confusing download options, lack of issue attachments). In the end, I think the display bug is a showstopper for me. I could work around some of the others by having a wiki page with links to downloads and revisions and giving that out as the home page perhaps. But that’s a lot of manual maintenance that I would rather avoid.

URL: github.com

Launchpad

Launchpad is the project management service operated by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. While Launchpad can optionally integrate well with Ubuntu, that isn’t required, so non-developers like me can work with it fine.

Launchpad does offer issue tracking, but no wiki. It has a forum of sorts though (the “Answers” section). It has some other features, such as blueprints, that would likely only be useful for projects larger than the ones I would plan to use it for.

It does have a downloads area, and they say they have a Python API. I haven’t checked it out, but if it supports scriptable uploads, that would work for me.

Besides the lack of a wiki, Launchpad is also tied to the bzr VCS. bzr was one of the early players in DVCS, written as a better-designed successor to tla/Arch and baz, but has no compelling features over Git or Mercurial for me today. I have no intention of switching to or using it any time soon.

Launchpad does let you “import” branches from another VCS such as Git or svn. I set up an “import” branch for a test project yesterday. 12 hours later, it still hasn’t imported anything; it’s just sitting at “pending review.” I have no idea if it ever will, or why setting up a bzr branch requires no review but a git branch requires review. So I am unable to test the integration between it and the changesets, which is really annoying.

So, some possibilities here, but the bzr-only thing really bugs me. And having to have my git trees reviewed really goes against the “quick and simple” project setup that I would have preferred to see.

URL: launchpad.net

Indefero

Indefero is explicitly a Google Code clone, but aims to be a better Google Code than Google Code. The interface is similar to Google’s — very simple and clean. Unlike Google Code, Indefero does support Git. It supports a wiki, downloads area, and issue tracker. You can download the PHP-based code and run it yourself, or you can get hosting from the Indefero site.

I initially was favorably impressed by Indefero, but as I looked into it more, I am not very impressed right now. Although it does integrate with Git, and you can refer to an issue number in a Git commit, a Git commit can’t close an issue. Git developers use git over ssh to interact with it, but it supports only one ssh key per user — so this makes it very annoying if I wish to push changes from all three of the machines I regularly do development with. Despite the fact that this is a “high priority” issue, it hasn’t been touched by the maintainer in almost a month, even though patches have been offered.

Indefero can generate files based on any revision in git, or based on the latest on any branch, but only in ZIP format (no tar.gz).

Although the program looks very nice and the developer clueful, Indefero has only one main active developer or committer, and he is a consultant that also works on other projects. That makes me nervous about putting too many eggs into the Indefero basket.

URL: indefero.net

Trac

Trac is perhaps the gold standard of lightweight project management apps. It has a wiki, downloads, issue tracking, and VCS integration (SVN only in the base version, quite a few others with 3rd-party plugins). I ran trac myself for awhile.

It also has quite a few failings. Chief among them is that you must run a completely separate Trac instance for each project. So there is no possible way to go to some dashboard and see all bugs assigned to you from all projects, for instance. That is what drove me away from it initially. That and the serious performance problems that most of its VCS backends have.

URL: trac.edgewall.org

Redmine

Redmine is designed to be a better Trac than Trac. It uses the same lightweight philosophy in general, has a wiki, issue tracker, VCS integration, downloads area, etc. But it supports multiple projects in a sane and nice way. It’s what I currently use over on software.complete.org.

Redmine has no API to speak of, though I have managed to cobble together an automatic uploader using curl. It was unpleasant and sometimes breaks on new releases, but it generally gets the job done.

I have two big problems with Redmine. One is performance. It’s slow. And when web spiders hit it, it sometimes has been so slow that it takes down my entire server. Because of the way it structures its URLs, it is not possible to craft a robots.txt that does the right thing — and there is no plan to completely fix it. There is, however, a 3rd-party plugin that may help.

The bigger problem relates to maintaining and upgrading Redmine. This is the first Ruby on Rails app I have ever used, and let me say it has made me want to run away screaming from Ruby on Rails. I’ve had such incredible annoyances installing and upgrading this thing that I can’t even describe what was wrong. All sorts of undocumented requirements for newer software, GEMS that are supposed to work with it but don’t, having to manually patch things so they actually work, conflicts with what’s on the system, and nobody in the Redmine, Rails, or Ruby communities being able to help. I upgrade rarely because it is such a hassle and breaks in such spectacular ways. I don’t think this is even Redmine’s fault; I think it’s a Rails and Ruby issue, but nevertheless, I am stuck with it. My last upgrade was a real mess — bugs in the PostgreSQL driver — the newer one that the newer GEM that the newer Redmine required — were sending invalid SQL to it. Finally patched it myself, and this AFTER the whole pain that is installing gems in Ruby.

I’d take a CGI script written in Bash over Ruby on Rails after this.

That said, Redmine has the most complete set of the features I want of all the programs I’ve mentioned on this page.

URL: redmine.org

Savannah

Savannah is operated by the Free Software Foundation, and runs a fork of the SourceForge software. Its fork does support Git, but lacks a wiki. It has the standard *forge issue tracker, download area, home page support, integrated mailing lists, etc. It also has the standard *forge over-complexity.

There is a command-line SourceForge uploader in Debian that could potentially be hacked to work with Savannah, but I haven’t checked.

URL: savannah.nongnu.org

berlios.de

Appears to be another *forge clone. Similar to Savannah, but with a wiki, ugly page layout, and intrusive ads.

URL: berlios.de

SourceForge

Used to be the gold-standard of project hosting. Now looks more like a back alley in a trashy neighborhood. Ads all over the place, and intrusive and ugly ones at that. The ads make it hard to use the interface and difficult to navigate, especially for newbies. No thanks.

Conclusions

The four options that look most interesting to me are: Indefero, Github, Gitorious, and staying with Redmine. The community features of Github, Gitorious, and Launchpad all sound interesting, but I don’t have the experience to evaluate how well they work in practice — and how well they encourage “drive by commits” for small projects.

Gitorious + Lighthouse and my own download server merits more attention. Indefero still makes me nervous due to the level of development activity and single main developer. Github has a lot of promise, but an interface that is too confusing and buggy for me to throw at end users. That leaves me with Redmine, despite all the Rails aggravations. Adding the bot blocking plugin may just get me what I want right now, and is certainly the path of least resistance.

I am trying to find ways to build communities around these projects. If I had more experience with Github or Gitorious, and thought their community features could make a difference for small projects, I would try them.

Real World Haskell update

Programming,

There’s been quite the activity around this book lately.

Pat Eyler of On Ruby published an interview with the three of us RWH authors. It apparently got some very positive comments on Reddit.

Over on Amazon, the book is continuing its streak of 5-star reviews. When I see a review there titled “Finally a Haskell book that I could understand”, I am very glad that we took the time to write Real World Haskell. It is great to know that people find it useful.

Some of you may know that the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is most certainly not common in the publishing world these days, and O’Reilly took a risk by letting us do it. We had tremendous community participation while we were writing it, and O’Reilly is quite pleased with the sales so far. I hope that this bodes well for future books released under such a license.

Why Do Web Applications Stink So Badly?

Programming,

So today, I happen to be looking at wikis for two small to mid-sized public proojects (MoinMoin and DokuWiki look like frontrunners right now — any suggestions?) Recently, I’ve also looked at blog and CMS software, and a host of other web apps. It’s as if these people have learned nothing about good software practices over the last 20 years.

Warning: Rant Ahead

So how many of you have been here before? You download WebApp X. It tells you to cd to your DocumentRoot and unzip/untar it there. At this point, most of them will tell you to chmod -R 777 the install directory. Some of the better ones, such as WordPress, will tell you to chmod it 777, or if that makes you nervous, to instead chown it to the user that your webserver runs as.

It is at this point that you realize that the Java-based programs ship with their own webserver that takes 2 minutes to load and uses 2GB of RAM, while the PHP-based programs want you to give them 32MB RAM per process, and probably modify your global PHP settings in a way that breaks some other PHP web app you’re already using.

As if that isn’t enough to scare you off, generally speaking, config files — including passwords to databases — are stored in the same directory, along with .htaccess files. Many of these programs are also downloading and updating plugins over the Internet, usually without any kind of cryptographic authentication, and overwriting their own program files in the process.

Oh, and this is a class of app that is notorious for security problems to start with, and makes your server known to billions of people via search engines.

Absolutely no opportunity for trouble here, of course! That sentence was dripping with sarcasm, in case you didn’t get it.

It also makes it almost impossible for people such as Debian maintainers to package up some webapps (such as just about every single one that uses Ruby on Rails) because there is just no sane way to make it behave with respect to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

I’d love to see web app developers do a few simple things:

  1. Separate code from data
  2. Separate code from configuration
  3. Separate all of the above from the DocumentRoot to the greatest extent possible

I realize that some of this is purportedly to make things easier to install when you have FTP access only. But to me it seems just really poor design. I’ve written webapps, and it’s not that hard to do this part right.

Plus, doing the above right means that I no longer have to do something like use git on my WordPress installations because it’s too much of a hassle to apply security and plugin updates on all three separate ones otherwise.

If Programming Languages Were Christmas Carols

Humor, Programming, , , , , ,

Last spring, I posted If Version Contol Systems Were Airlines, which I really enjoyed. Now, because I seem to have a desire to take a good joke way too far, it’s time for:

IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE CHRISTMAS CAROLS

I apologize in advance. (Feel free to add your own verses/carols in the comments.)

Away in a Pointer (C)

(to Away in a Manger)

Away in a pointer, the bits in a row.
A little dereference to see where they go.
I look down upon thee, and what do I see?
A segfault and core dump, right there just for me.

I saw thy init there, a reaping away
My process, from its address space, so sorry to say.
I thought I had saved thee, from void pointers all,
But maybe I missed one, and doomed you to fall.

Be near me, debugger, I ask thee to stay
Close by my terminal, and help me, I pray;
To find all the bugs and the void pointers too,
And if my kernel oopses, help me reboot for you.

Joy to the Wall (Perl)

(to Joy to the World)

Joy to the Wall, the Perl is come!
Let awk receive her King;
Let every grep prepare him room,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash and sed shall sing,
And bash, and bash, and sed shall sing.

Joy to the keyboard, we’ll use it all!
Let men, shift keys, employ;
Implicit variables, and globals never fall.
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat the line noise now,
Repeat, repeat, the line noise now.

Perl rules the world with truth and ASCII,
And makes the doctors prove
The glories of carpal tunnel hands,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it more than one way,
And we do it, and we do it, more than one way.

Hark! The Herald Coders Sing (Haskell)

(to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing)

Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive King;
Recursion and patterns wild,
Pure and IO — they’re reconciled!”
Joyful, all ye functions rise,
Join the typeclasses of the types,
With recursion, do proclaim,
“Laziness is born in this domain.”

Refrain
Hark! The herald coders sing,
“Map and fold, recursive king!”

Monads, by highest Heav’n adored;
Monads, their depths still unexplored;
Late in time, behold they’re good,
Never once were understood.
Veiled in functions, the Monads stay,
Used for IO, and more, each day,
With excitement, Monads say,
“Arrows are stranger, so with us stay.”

(Refrain)

Hail the glorious compiler of Glasgow!
Hail the threaded run-time system!
Join the beautiful Cabal of Hackage,
Upload there thy perfect package.
We know best, what we will Handle,
You’re safe with us: no pointers, no vandals.
Born to make your exceptions throw,
Unless you unsafePerformIO.

(Refrain)

Lispy the Paren

(to Frosty the Snowman)

Lispy the paren was a jolly happy soul,
With a lot of cars and a little cons
And two ends made out of curves.
Lispy the paren is a fairy tale, they say,
He was just common, but the children know
how he came to life one day.
There must have been some magic in that
Old Symbolics they found.
For when they placed him on its disk,
It recursed around and ’round.

O, Lispy the paren,
Was recursive as can be.
And the coders say it would take a day
To put his parens away.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Look at Lispy go.
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Clunkety clunk clunk,
Consing on the car.

Lispy the snowman knew
The keyboard was hot the day,
So he said, “Let’s cons and we’ll have some fun
now before they Scheme away.”
Down to the function,
With a list there in his RAM,
Running here and there,
all around the LAN, saying
“cdr me if you can.”
He led them down the streets of disk
Right to the traffic bus.
And only paused a moment when
He heard them holler (quit).

Oh BASIC Night

(to O Holy Night)

Oh BASIC night, the LEDs are brightly glinting;
It is the night of the dear GOSUB’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error printing,
Till you appeared and the RAM felt its worth.
Shiver of fear, line numbers do inspire,
For yonder breaks a mostly harmless GOTO.
Fall on your bits, O hear the Visual voices!
O BASIC divine, O BASIC where GOTO was born!
O BASIC, O Holy BASIC, O BASIC, you’re mine!

Some want to say, “GOTO is harmful always,”
But what of them, in their post-modern world.
We PRINT the truth, in the line-numbered goodness,
But Dijkstra appeared, and the faith, it was lost.
A thrill of hope, when .NET BASIC announces,
But Visual BASIC, what kind of thing are you?
Fall on your GUI, O see the old line numbers!
Behold BASICA, O BASIC when DOS was born!
O numbers, O lines, spaghetti divine!

Guido We Have Heard on High (Python)

(to Angels We Have Heard on High)

Guido we have hard on high
Sweetly indenting o’re the code,
And the functions in reply
Their exceptions sweetly flowed.

Refrain

Indent….. in your whitespace careful!
Indent…… in your whitespace careful!

Spaces, why this jubilee?
Why semicolons have you so wronged?
What backslashes must we use
If we want our lines so long?

(Refrain)

Come to Guido here to see
“One Right Way” is good, of course.
There’s no need for Perl, you know,
We have to be more verbose.

(Refrain)

Now the PEP will show the way
To the future, we shall see.
Banish lambda and the rest
Of the things we liked the best.

(Refrain)

Real World Haskell Update

Programming,

Times are exciting. Our book, Real World Haskell, is now available in a number of venues. But before I get to that, I’ve got to talk about what a thrill this project has been.

I created our internal Darcs repository in May, 2007. Since then, the three of us has made 1324 commits — and that doesn’t count work done by copyeditors and others at O’Reilly.

We made available early drafts of the book online for commenting, which served as our tech review process. By the time we finished writing the book, about 800 people had submitted over 7,500 comments. I’ve never seen anything like it, and really appreciate all those that commented about it.

As for availability, RWH is available:

  • For immediate purchase with electronic delivery, from O’Reilly’s page
  • For immediate viewing on Safari Books Online, at its book page
  • Paper editing timing is still tentative, but we’re estimating arrival in bookstores the week of December 8.

People are talking about it on blogs, twitter, etc. We’re excited!

New Twitter Client: Twidge

Programming

I’ve lately been thinking about Twitter. I wanted some way to quickly post tweets from the command line. But I also wanted to be able to receive them in a non-intrusive way on all my machines. And I wanted to work with Twitter and Identi.ca both.

Nothing quite existed to do that, so I wrote Twidge.

Twidge is a command-line Twitter client. It can be run quite nicely interactively, with output piped through less. Or you can run it as a unidirectional or bidirectional mail gateway. Or you can use its parser-friendly output options to integrate it with shell scripts or other programs.

It’s got an 11-page manual (which is also its manpage). User-friendly in the best tradition of command line programs.

And it’s released today. The source packages include the debian/ directory for you to use for building them, but I’ve also posted an i386 binary that runs on etch and sid on my webpage, until it gets out of NEW.

See the homepage for more info.

Oh, it’s written in Haskell, by the way.

Knuth and Reusable Code

Programming

In the recent interview with InformIT, Donald Knuth said:

I also must confess to a strong bias against the fashion for reusable code. To me, “re-editable code” is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit. I could go on and on about this. If you’re totally convinced that reusable code is wonderful, I probably won’t be able to sway you anyway, but you’ll never convince me that reusable code isn’t mostly a menace.

I have tried in vain to locate any place where he talks about this topic at greater length. Does anyone have a link?

At long last, software.complete.org migrated to Redmine

Programming, ,

I’ve been writing a bit about Trac and Redmine lately. For approximately the 1/3 of the publically-available software that I’ve written, I maintain a Trac site for it at software.complete.org. This 1/3 is generally the third that has the most interest from others, and there’s a bug tracker, wiki, download area, etc.

Trac is nice, and much nicer than one of the *Forge systems for a setup of this scale. But it has long bugged me that Trac has no integration between projects. To see what open bugs are out there on my software, I have to check — yes — 17 individual bug trackers.

To keep track on the wikis to make sure that nobody is adding spam, I have to subscribe to 17 different RSS feeds.

It took me some time just to hack up a way so I didn’t have to have 17 different accounts to log in to…

So, mainly, my use case for Trac isn’t what it was intended for.

Enter Redmine. It’s similar in concept to Trac — a lightweight project management system. But unlike Trac, Redmine allows you to have separate projects, but still manage them all as one if you please.

Redmine didn’t have Git support in its latest release, but there was a patch in Redmine’s BTS for it. I discussed why it wasn’t being applied with Redmine’s author, and then went in and fixed it up myself. (I used Git to make a branch off the Redmine SVN repo — very slick.) Unlike Trac’s Git support, Redmine’s is *fast*. I tested it against a clone of the Linux kernel repo on my local machine.

There are a few things about Redmine I don’t like, but I have learned that they mainly have to do with Ruby on Rails. As someone pointed out on Planet Debian lately (sorry, can’t find the link), the very nature of Rails makes it almost impossible for OS developers like Debian to include Rails apps in the distribution.

Not only that, but it seems like Rails assumes that even if you are just going to *use* an app, you know how to *write* one. For instance, this is pretty much the extent of documentation on how to set up a Rails app to be able to send out mail:


# See Rails::Configuration for more options

And of course, googling that turns up nothing useful.

Redmine is a rails app, so it cannot escape some of this. It seems to be a solid piece of work, but Rails seems to make things unnecessarily complex. That, and I’ve found some bugs in the underlying Rails infrastructure (like activerecord not quoting the schema name when talking to PostgreSQL) that make me nervous about the stack.

But the site is up and running well now, so I’m happy, and am planning to keep working with Redmine for quite some time.

If Version Control Systems were Airlines

Humor, Programming

Many of you have seen the net classic If Operating Systems Were Airlines. Today, let’s consider what the world might be like if version control systems were airlines…

Before anyone gets mad, this is all in fun, OK?

RCS Airlines: One of the first airlines, from way back when this whole aviation thing was new and exciting. Each RCS flight carries exactly one passenger, which RCS believes is a superior way to fly. Although most RCS airplanes are rusty and battered today, RCS Airlines still retains its historic dedication to security. Each airplane is kept locked as much as possible for safety. Occasionally flights will be delayed for hours because the pilot can’t open the locked plane. When this happens, the pilot will frantically try to get the cell phone number of whoever it is that has locked the plane. When the plane finally gets unlocked, you may be tempted to ask why it was locked for so long. Veteran RCS users have learned that the answer is usually disgusting, and never ask anymore. Main competitor: CP/M airlines.

CVS Airlines: Founded on the belief that they could be more efficient than RCS by carrying multiple passengers per flight. They still carry each passenger in a separate RCS-built airplane, but the airplanes fly in a goose-like “,V” formation. Watch out for layovers, though. It can take hours to merge new passengers into the formation properly, and it might take several attempts to take off afterwards.

CVS flights often feature fights over who gets to fly. CVS piloting fights are legendary; rumor has it that OpenBSD got started after CVS airlines refused to allow a passenger to board on the grounds that he had in the past refused to stow his tray table in the upright and locked position.

CVS airlines mostly counts as customers the “over-50” crowd who grew up using CVS and don’t like change. Its in-flight magazine features advertisements for balding-reversal treatments and uuencode tools.

Main competitor: AIX airlines.

Subversion Airlines: Started by some grey-haired CVS executives with long, wispy beards, Subversion airlines got started by trying to be “CVS, but better”. Subversion airlines was the first major airline to use planes that seat more than one passenger. Unlike CVS airlines, all passengers on a Subversion flight travel in the same plane.

Subversion airlines is famous for its Soviet-like centralized control. All operations must be approved by the Kremlin, and you are allowed, by the grace of the Party Leader, to gaze at the massive airplanes. Those that have served the Party and Airline well for many years are allowed to enter the Great Shrine of the First-Class Comitter, and actually make changes to the airplanes themselves. Plainclothes Subversion Airlines security agents lurk on every flight, and you should not be surprised to be thrown out an airplane window if you make a joke in bad taste about the pilot’s flying skills.

Subversion airlines thrives on the concept that “photocopying is cheap”. You are encouraged to make photocopies of your ticket, or to photocopy your photo ID, and give copies of each to as many people as you can. At checkin time at the gate, if more than one person arrives with a copy of the same ticket, they are ushered into the “merging room” and each person is given a brick. The door is closed, something magical occurs, and the one person that emerges still able to walk is allowed to board the plane.

Main competitor: Windows airlines with no Administrators allowed.

tla airlines: Founded by one of those eccentric British noblemen, Lord Tom’s airline is the utopian philosopher’s airline. Chafed by the heavy-handed control of Subversion Airlines, tla airlines wants every passenger to be created equal. As you approach the gate area in the terminal, you will find many philosophers occupying the gate area, extolling the virtues of tla airlines. They compare tla airlines to reaching out and touching the heavens, leaving behind the bonds of a ground-based life, actually merging with the stars. Oh, the gorgeous beauty of it all! The things we will see!

As you see people arriving from another flight, you observe that some of them have burn marks. One of them comments that “merging with the stars doesn’t work.” Immediately, a dozen philosophers get in a fight with him, claiming that he simply doesn’t understand what it means to merge with the stars, and that if he gets his inner being in the proper state first, he’ll have a much better experience.

As you board the tla airplane, you obvserve that the jetway is a mile long. The airplane itself reminds you of something of a cross between a gothic cathedral and a level of Doom. There are spectacular archways everywhere, sometimes where they don’t really belong. Each archway is supported by ornate curly braces which you don’t normally see on airplanes, and frankly, you’d rather not, because they look all pointy and confuse the kids.

As you arrive as your destination terminal, you see it too is full of philosophers, most of them dining.

Main competitor: VMS airlines.

Darcs Airlines: Unlike every other airline, this one uses physicists instead of engineers to design its airplanes. One brilliant Darcs physicist has finally come up with The Theory of Everything, and as such, Darcs knows where you want to go before even you do. Darcs airlines prides itself on customer service, and asks your preference for even the tiniest details about your trip.

Each seat pocket features a copy of the Theory of Everything for your reading enjoyment, but nobody actually understands it.

Occasionally, you will find that Darcs pilots get into angry conflicts with the control tower in mid-flight. This results in the control tower revoking your permission to land. Legend has it that one Darcs pilot of a plane with exceptionally large fuel tanks actually resolved his conflict with the tower and landed two weeks after taking off. Experienced Darcs users board with several parachutes: one for themselves, and a few more for the newbies.

The Darcs physicists claim that the Theory of Everything predicted the pilots would act this way, and that all pilots eventually act this way throughout the entire universe. They toil day and night finding a way to adjust the gravitational constant of the universe, thereby reducing the anger factor of the pilots.

Main competitor: OS/2 airlines.

bzr airlines: Founded by a South African who had been injured by a curly brace on tla airlines, bzr airlines aims to be “tla done right”. They have shortened the jetway, gotten rid of the curly braces, chased out the philosophers, and no longer have a vision of merging with the stars. Many that were injured on tla airlines fly bzr airlines, and out of respect for tla airlines, bzr airlines will still honor tla tickets.

bzr passengers consider themselves part of an exclusive club because each flight takes off from a launchpad. They often can be seen standing in the terminal passing out bzr literature, trying to get passengers of other airlines to fly bzr, and can’t understand how other airlines continue to exist while people keep walking past their airplanes.

Main competitor: BeOS Airlines.

Bitkeeper Airlines: One of the world’s faster airlines, Bitkeeper airlines occupied that obscure gate for rich people at the end of the terminal for many years. Tickets on Bitkeeper Airlines were rumored to cost thousands of dollars, and were rare and jealously guarded. Then for awhile, Bitkeeper Airlines started giving away tickets for free, though they also kept around the expensive tickets for those with discriminating tastes. Free tickets were made widely available, but the 3-point type on the back of tickets said that you were never allowed to think about another airline before, after, or during your flight, and some people claimed they actually saw the small print morphing right before their eyes.

Bitkeeper flights often featured arguments over whether people were harboring secret thoughts of other airlines. If you were caught thinking about another airline, you were expected to scream vigorously while being thrown out the escape hatch without a parachute. All of this commotion tarnished the rarified air that the rich people paid to experience, so one day it was decided that there would be a Great Purge, because obviously all free ticket holders had harbored lustful thoughts of other airlines, so they were all thrown off the airplanes simultaneously. Today, people aren’t exactly sure where the Bitkeeper gate is, but everyone suspects it still lurks somewhere.

Main competitor: SCO Airlines.

Mercurial Airlines: The “there’s one right way to do it” airline, Mercurial is a sterile, agile, and shiny airline. Every Mercurial airplane looks identical to every other one, shiny and clean. You could swear that all the passengers look alike too, and as you approach the gate, it seems like you too look like everyone else. Mercurial passengers tend to be a happy bunch, who can’t comprehend anybody that flies Git Airlines. Specks of dirt and dust confuse the pilots, so it is best to make sure you have showered before boarding. It is rumored that, through bolting on more engines, some Mercurial airlines can fly to as many places as Git airlines can, but most Mercurial passengers are content to not worry about that.

Main competitor: Python Airlines.

Git Airlines: The “there’s more than one way to do it” airline, Git flies the world’s largest and fastest airplanes. Git Airlines was founded by some priests who were flying for free on Bitkeeper Airlines and survived the fall after the Great Purge. Git airplanes start as spartan, empty cabins, with no carpeting, chairs, or piloting controls. At the departure gate, each passenger is handed a bag containing 173 standard airplane components, accompanied by a 4×5″ sheet of information on the theory of flight, written in 1950. Once onboard, the passengers use these components to finish out the airplane for flight: installing chairs, rudder controls, etc. Every flight results in a plane assembled in a different way, and passengers on each flight believe they are flying the world’s best airplane. Arguments in the terminal after a flight are common, as passengers from different flights debate the merits of their particular design.

Despite all this, Git planes turn out to be safe, and Git passengers believe they get to their destinations in half the time it takes any other passengers, though sometimes they secretly wonder if the Mercurial flight got there faster. Occasionally, passengers on Git airlines build an airplane that appears to go into a tailspin. When that happens, they simply assemble a tool that lets them go back in time and change history so that it doesn’t crash, although it is rumored that if you are a member of the public watching this happen from the ground, it will lead to seizures.

Git airlines takes special pride in the one piece that passengers don’t have to assemble: the plumbing. Every Git lavatory is equipped with state-of-the-art never-fail plumbing, and the best porcelain washroom fixtures money can buy. None of these cheap plastic toilets like you get on every other airline. Here, we have fine porcelain fixtures.

During a flight, after passengers use the lavatory, they frequently get into arguments with each other about which style of porcelain toilet is the best. These arguments are only resolved by the Zen-like Git Priests, who insist that only inferior passengers need to use a toilet while in the air.

Main competition: Perl Airlines.

Git Feature Branches

Programming,

I’m really liking this.

So I set up some Git feature branches to help get Redmine patches from their BTS into their SVN trunk faster. (I don’t know why, but it seems to take a *very* long time for that to happen.)

Each BTS patch gets a Git feature branch. My Git repo for this project has about 21 branches in it.

So, I pull upstream into a branch called, well, upstream.

Each feature branch is created off upstream.

Then, the master branch merges all the feature branches in. I wrote a simple git-merge-fb shell script that just runs git-merge for each feature branch. Very simple. I expect to have a git-pull-fb script of some sort that merges upstream into each feature branch when I update against upstream. It could also run a diff at the end to see if there is any difference remaining, and if not, delete the branch.

It’s trivial to give an updated diff to upstream for any given patch: git diff feature-blah..upstream will do it.

I only wish gitweb had a way to do that so I could just hand out a URL that always corresponds to the latest diff against upstream for a given feature. Now that would rock.