[jewel] Hacker Paralysis
- From: MJ Ray <markj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: jewel-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 21:59:27 -1100
This is sort of off-topic, but explains what I'm playing at just now.
I think we've become old hackers, as in
http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html :--
It's tricky to keep the two forces balanced. In young hackers,
optimism predominates. They produce something, are convinced it's
great, and never improve it. In old hackers, skepticism predominates,
and they won't even dare to take on ambitious projects.
What is holding me back? As you probably know, I hate CVS. Really
hate. It breaks horribly and that's something you don't want your
revision control system to do. So, I've tried various alternatives.
aegis is a lot of configuration. PRCS requires some hoop-jumping for
network operation. arch is basically there (in two implementations, no
less) but not very user-friendly yet IMO. I don't find any of them
hackable and doubt my own ability to implement something better (see
scepticism above).
So I'm not going to try. The formats and methods for arch are
semi-documented and there seems to be an arch-users list that is
thoughtful and helpful. So I shall try to implement enough arch
compatibility to let me hack freely again. I will start with treediff
and treepatch programs that make arch-format patchfiles/changesets.
I'll be writing in guile first, as it's probably the most widely
available scheme and writing scheme makes me happy. Then I'll write
something to make these changeset files available in an easy way and
start hacking on my main programs (like jewel) again. arch details are
at http://arch.fifthvision.net/ or the debian arch package, I think.
--
MJR http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ IM: slef@xxxxxxxxx
This is my home web site. This for Jabber Messaging.
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