Planet Ben Collins-Sussman

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone link to these great recent blog posts by Ben Collins-Sussman of Subversion fame.

This discussion on why DVCS is currently too much to ask for 80% of programmers (not necessarily 80% of free software developers) was a great read, especially with the comments. I once moved a 30-person project from Visual SourceSafe to Subversion, and I had to face a political battle with process folks in addition to resistance from some 80%ers. Most 80%ers just didn't care, because all they ever needed/wanted to know was "svn up" and "svn commit" (in TortoiseSVN, of course).

And here's a really informative post on consuming meat responsibly, sustainably, and ethically. You don't have to read it if you're allergic to non-technical posts.

And just in case anybody hasn't seen it, here's a link to the fantastic "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)" talk he did with Brian Fitzpatrick. I refer to this whenever I'm in doubt about how a maintainer should behave (since it's kind of new for me).

That reminds me...

All of this discussion about distributed source control systems got me thinking about a little piece of abandonware I wrote last year to help me manage permissions in a Subversion repository I was administering. I kept meaning to release it, but it needed a lot of polish so I kept waiting. Nowadays I don't do much svn repo administration, so I have less incentive than ever to work on it, and it still needs polish. I haven't worked on it in almost a year.

But it's a great excuse to mess around with a DSCM and see what all the fuss is about. I picked bzr because it has Windows support, and because if it bugs me I'm more likely to hack on Python code than a bunch of C and Bash.

bzr co http://www.gnome.org/~sharm/svnservant

If I ever get around to cleaning up this very "my first pygtk app", I'll post a proper introduction.

In the mean time, I'm using bzr* 0.15 because that's what comes with Feisty. I'm also using Meld 1.1.4 to view my diffs, but its bzr support is nowhere near as good as its svn support. Olive-gtk is alright, too. Any suggestions for bzr bliss?

Oh, and thanks to John Carr for starting this page on using bzr with GNOME svn. Awesome, dude! Why did I have to find this by accident?

Using ssh-agent to stop getting prompted OVER AND OVER AGAIN for GNOME svn+ssh password

I'm mostly posting this as a reminder for myself, since I'm probably the only GNOME developer who didn't know how to do it. But if you're tired of getting prompted for your ssh password three times during `svn co`, and several other times throughout a hacking session, this command is for you:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

If you're running GNOME, chances are ssh-agent is already running when you log in. The above command prompts you for your SSH password then adds your SSH key (at least, that's where I keep my GNOME SSH key) to the running agent. And that is the last time you'll have to enter that password until your next log in.

This was very exciting to me...

UPDATE: I guess seahorse (slated for inclusion in GNOME 2.18) does the same stuff, but graphically.