Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Here’s another update on my version control system escapades (a follow up to Do I have…).

As several people mentioned during the 0.10 release of gq, the name is already in use by a rather well established project. So, after some idleing and hacking, I decided that it was time to give the scripts a new name, and announce the new version on the git and linux-kernel mailing lists (the annoucement). I can’t take credit for the rather clever name, I asked a few people, and the best suggestion was by Dave - Git Quilt or Guilt for short.

One thing I did not expect was the fact that someone would contribute 2 patches very shortly after I announced it. Here’s the list of changes that made between v0.16 and v0.17:

Horst H. von Brand (2):
      Fix up Makefiles
      Run regression on the current version

Josef 'Jeff' Sipek (24):
      A minimalistic makefile
      Contributing doc file
      Added guilt-add
      Added guilt-status
      Expanded the HOWTO
      Added usage strings to all commands
      All arguments to guilt-add are filenames
      More thorough argument checking & display usage string on failure
      Changed status file format to include the hash of the commit
      Fixed guilt-refresh doing an unnecessary and somewhat wrong pop&push
      Fixed up guilt-{delete,pop} not matching the patch name properly
      Fixed guilt-{delete,pop} regexps some more
      Force UTC as timezone for regression tests
      Fixed a bug in guilt-pop introduced by the status file format switch
      Error messages should go to stderr
      Merge branch 'usage'
      Merge branch 'status-file'
      Yet another TODO update
      Added guilt-rm
      Makefile update & cleanup
      pop: Display the name of the patch from the status file, not the series file
      new: Create dir structure for the patch if necessary
      Documentation/TODO: Mark guilt-rm as done
      Guilt v0.17

I haven’t had much time to work on Guilt since then, but I got an rather encouriging email from someone, who tried to apply Andrew Morton’s -mm patch series on top of the kernel tree, but failed. The problem is with the way git-apply works. If it applies a patch with an offset, it still returns non-zero status. This makes guilt think that at least one of the hunks in the patch did not apply at all. As far as I know, there is no way to get the necessary information out of git-apply without either modifying it (which I might as well), or parsing the output for signs of rejection and ignoring the return status completely. I don’t like the latter, but changing git-apply would limit the number of compatible git versions. :-/

Needless to say, patches are welcomed :)

So, for whatever reason, I seem to be working on version control systems far too much. I have a decent amount of code in Mercurial, I wrote a bunch of wrappers for CVS, I call them CDS which stands for Completely Dumb System which is an apt description of CVS. And now I am working on gq (git repo: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jsipek/gq.git) which is a porcelain (set of wrapper scripts for git) that gives a Mercurial Queues-like functionality to git users.

Yep, I think it is official, I have a thing for version control systems. Ever since I became very interested in them (~April 2005), I learned a lot about them, and I am kind of tempted to give it a go and try something of my own. :)

The day began with an awesome presentation I gave about Unionfs. :) Shawn was recoding it, but after the presentation, he found out that the video turned out to be crap. He has audio only. I’m sure he’ll share it soon. :) I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people that use Unionfs or were interested in Unionfs.

The keynote was excelent as always. However I must say that Greg K-H made it sound like any piece of code will get into the kernel. Yeah, right :) But he did say few nice things about the status of Linux.

After the keynote, there was the GPG key signing - which I did not attend, although I wanted to. Instead we went to get some food. Food was good, we (I, Dave, Mike Halcrow, and Prof. Zadok) talked about a bunch of things ranging from MythTV and terabyte storage servers, to things like the number of ants in Texas. (Apparently, it is a lot of fun to watch termites and fire ants battle to the death. O_o )

We finished food around 19:45 which was about right to head over to the Black Thorn for the after event party. Just as last year it was quite interesting. Pretty much as soon as I got there, I noticed Peter Baudis aka. pasky - the cogito maintainer. We chatted about how git and Mercurial differ (Matt’s talk the day before came in handy :) ). I mentioned I was slowly working on a generic benchmark script that would test a number of popular SCMs including Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS. He was thrilled about the prospect of knowing exactly where git sucked compared to other SCMs - my guess is that he wants to fix it and make it better, a noble goal, but unnecessary as Mercurial already exists and why reinvent the wheel? ;) Seriously, though, I think a lot of people would benefit from knowing exactly where each SCM excels, and where each sucks. The nice thing about collaborating with the git people would be that it would make it more apparent that this wouldn’t just be yet-another-fake-test. After some time, a bunch of other Czech people poped up right next to us (people like, Pavel Machek, etc.). It was quite interesting. :)

After than I joined a converation with some Intel people. As it turns out, one of the Intel people is working on the e1000 driver — awesome piece of hardware, by the way, don’t ever buy anything other than it. :) Some time later, Jens Axboe joined the group briefly. When he said my name seemed familiar, I mentioned how I tried to implement IO priorities - and failed :) Later on, a guy from University of Toronto joined the group. He approached me earlier in the day about unionfs on clusters. We chatted about things ranging from school (undergraduate program, and grad school) to submitting kernel code to lkml. The e1000 guy said a similar thing that we should split unionfs up into a few patches, and send it off. During the event a few people still asked me about Unionfs, which felt good :)

Then, I decided that it would be fun to talk to some IRC people. I found John Levon and Seth Arnold. We sat down, and had an interesting conversation about a number of things. Since at least some of these were quite interesting, here’s a list:

1. How can I deal with VFS and not drink vodka or other hard liquer
2. Everybody hates CDE, even people at Sun
3. Solaris is dead (well, they didn’t say it, but that’s the feeling I got)
4. Brittons have some interesting sports or at least some of the expected behavior during the sport is interesting, namely:

1. darts - you are expected to drink as you play
2. I can’t recall the name - gigantic pool table
3. cricket - everyone smokes "reefer" (to quote Movement, I just find this name of the substance mildly amusing) because their games sometimes take several days

After that, they kicked everyone out as it was 2:45 already. We (Seth, John, and I) went back to the hotel. There, Prof. Zadok and Chip (who arrived on Friday) were about to get up and head to the airport. :) I just went to bed.