Monday, 22 January 2001

Sinfest and CVS

Listening to:

Rachmaninoff, Vespers (All-night vigil).

A lost comic:

Sinfest. Comics drawn in a cute, yet stylish, anime style. Some are rather coarse; others feature God and/or the Devil in a variety of clever and slapstick confrontations. I’ve created three pages of links to some I particularly liked.

Now reading:

Boethius, The consolation of philosophy. More on this when I finish it, probably next weekend.

Holiday reading:

Karl Fogel, Open source development with CVS.

Lest you think that I read nothing but Patrick O’Brian while away, I also read this while staying with friends in Brisbane. This was a slightly odd combination of manual for the CVS tool (which is a great and useful tool indeed, I have to say), and a discussion of the issues involved in running an Open Source project. For example, among the latter he discusses when and how to fork a project. (This is what happened to create the two current major emacs implementations, GNU Emacs and XEmacs.) This latter material is perhaps a little touchy-feely, but it's an enjoyable read.

The material explaining CVS is very clear, and though I thought I knew the system reasonably well, I have now have a much better understanding of how the -j flag to cvs update works. Further, all of the CVS material from this book is available for free (under the GPL even) from the book’s site.

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