colin@
colino.net

At the beginning of this month, Larry McVoy of Bitmover fame stated that his company was going to phase out the free (as in beer) Bitkeeper client that a number of Linux developers use. As a result of this, Linus Torvalds took a week to figure out alternatives to Bitkeeper, and finally, not finding anything that fit his needs, started writing git. Git development has rapidly intensified, with other developers joining. As this is not a standard SCM and doesn’t compete with existing solutions like Arch, Darcs, or Bitkeeper, it works for them.

However, even if the influence of this change on kernel development has been quite well contained, it looks like it “fuzzied” the process a bit. I currently more patches than ever (still not much, but this is significantly more than usual) in my patchset. Some of these are from BenH or David Brownell, the cpufreq ones are required to get 2.6.12-rc3 to even compile on PPC. The ones that are from me have been pushed to various maintainers but until now, they only landed in -mm. There’s not even a 2.6.12-rc3-mm1 on kernel.org yet…

Looks strange. In my experience, patches found their way to mainline really fast. Let’s hope they’ll get up to speed after 2.6.12!

Update: 2.6.12-rc4 just went out, and it contains all of the patches I needed to get a rock stable sleep support on the iBook. Nice :)

Yesterday my girlfriend and I decided to rent a bike to have a little trip, as it was sunny there. We went to the bike renting station, which is a service from the local collectivity with attractive prices (1 € for the afternoon). I saw that the software they use runs on some kind of Linux distribution, nice !

On the other hand their bikes are rather heavy and only have three speeds, which means it’s hard when you have the wind blowing in your face for a few kilometers. We only made about 20 km and my legs are dead today :-/

Looks like the free-as-in-beer Bitkeeper will soon disappear. You probably read about it all over the internet so I don’t have to explain the causes and consequences of this Bitmover decision.

I personnally don’t care very much, as I don’t hack on Linux quite enough to need such a solution. A few scripts to handle the patches I make or use are more than enough for me. However I really hope it won’t disrupt the flow, as the Linux machinery was working really nicely these days, mainly thanks to Andrew Morton and Bitkeeper. Let’s hope they’ll find some good solution. Also, I find it curious that Stallman didn’t yet issue a noisy told-you-so speech – he was right all along, after all.

Still speaking about Linux, I just finished my first week at my new workplace; it’s been delighting to work there this week, and I certainly hope it’ll continue! I’m employed as part-time sysadmin, part-time developer, depending on the work load. This week I’ve mainly been a sysadmin, and I get to play^W work on nice X86_64 bi-processor servers, make them work with Infiniband NICs and so on. Really interesting!

After trying to upgrade gnome on my iBook running gentoo, I found myself waiting a few hours for it to compile everything. And then, when reopening my session, nothing worked anymore (nautilus dying, applets dying, …). As the only other Linux PPC CD I have at home is a really out of date Debian (realize how old stuff is on this thing!), I found myself forced to reinstall Mac OS X to get work done.

Well, I’m quite happy I did this: at least it Just Works – and this Expose stuff is really nice!

Update: Ok, just kidding! Who fell for it ? ;-)