SCM-NG

There was another a problem I didn’t mention in my Subversion homedir blog.

It is not distributed.

So when hendry.iki.fi goes down or when I do not have a net connection(on a laptop), development halts. I can’t roll back easily, move/copy files about or run my favourite command svn diff effectively after an edit.

Last Tuesday I attended a talk by Robert Collins about Bazaar at LUV.

He comes across as a smart guy and I will make an effort to switch from Subversion to his project.

The thing I wanted with SCMs was something like what I’ve seen in Plan9. If you have not checked out the Plan9 operating system you are really missing out. It comes with some great papers and now you can try Plan9 in Xen.

The Plan9 inbuilt command history gives you previous versions of the file. If you care to look at the examples, it suggests using it on a file which has current login information, in order to see when and how often someone logged in.

HOW COOL IS THAT?

An inbuilt SCM into the filesystem. I have been dreaming of using such features (in Debian) since I saw it.

I asked Robert Collins about Plan9 during his talk and he pointed out that Plan9 is a homogeneous system. Great features they are, like distributed computing but those features aren’t portable to Win32. This fact hit me like a relevation.

He’s right. We live in a world of legacy technologies. Microsoft might be beaten on the server and API, but their software is going to be around for generations to come.

That seriously limits Plan9’s amazing design from the ground up.

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