Present Perfect

Now that we have one web developer on Linux and one on Windows, I get to experience first-hand the pain of EOL markers.  On the one hand I'm trying to teach my guys why it makes sense to use a VCS (and how it is better than FTP even though it's more complicated), but on the other hand it takes a while for anyone to notice that when the Windows guy commits something, the whole file has been changed and nobody knows what happened in the commit.

And obviously I figure this out the first time I want to use svnmerge to merge from trunk to a deployment branch.

It seems like Subversion could have made this a lot simpler from the get-go.

But anyway, after some Googling I realize I need the following things:

• set svn:eol-style property to native on all "text" files (DONE)
• set up svn client-side configurations for everyone to automatically set these properties
• get a pre-commit check to make sure that these things are set as needed (see the warning in this section) It is nice of the Subversion book to tell us what we should do.  But surely you could have given us a simple script to do the right thing ?

So, plea for help - any of you nice hackers out there have a decent client-side configuration file and a matching pre-commit hook to check ?

Now that we have one web developer on Linux and one on Windows, I get to experience first-hand the pain of EOL markers.  On the one hand I'm trying to...

God darn it.  Apparently automake 1.10 now warns me that constructs like this:

pychecker_indep_files = $(filter-out $(pychecker_010_files),$(pychecker_all_files))

use GNU make-specific features and are thus not portable.

So I started looking for "what is POSIX make anyway" and all I could find was this page which is irritatingly concise and doesn't leave me with a whole lot of options.

Anyone know what sort of text/list manipulation one can rely on when trying to stay portable ? Or is there simply no point in trying to support anything else than GNU make ?

God darn it.  Apparently automake 1.10 now warns me that constructs like this: pychecker_indep_files = $(filter-out $(pychecker_010_files),$(pychecker_all_files)) use GNU make-specific features and are thus not portable. So I started looking...

I wanted to clean up our work repositories a little, because I'm working on a platform deployment that is using something else than our venerable FC5 set of packages.

There's two things I wanted to do.  First, I wanted something that would clean out old rpm's from a directory - the ones that have been superseded by a newer version of a package.

Second, I wanted a script that could compare two directories (for two different base distros) and tell me which packages are of a different version between the two of them.  This tells me which packages I forgot to rebuild for either platform.

I've been googling for half an hour to find anything helpful, but it's hard to use google when you're not sure what you would call stuff like this.  In the end I caved in and wrote the first script in half an hour with the help of Paul Nasrat's excellent introductory slides (which I need to go through pretty much any time I write any rpm-related code).

Anyway, maybe you know of the existence of a script that does the second thing I want ? If not, odds are I'm going to write it in the next day as time permits.

I wanted to clean up our work repositories a little, because I'm working on a platform deployment that is using something else than our venerable FC5 set of packages. There's...

I'm going to be an Evo bug avoidance master if I keep this up.

Today's annoying Evo problem is "sometimes when you drag and drop mails, something gets stuck and Evo stays in drop mode even though I've released the mouse button."  If you've ever ran into this you'll know what I mean and how annoying it is.

For the others, the biggest annoyance is that, at this point, your mouse and keyboard are useless in X.  There's nothing you can click, close, or resize with your mouse to leave drop mode.  Most of your keystrokes go to evolution, you can't even activate the panel or switch to other tasks.   You can only switch to console and Do Stuff from there.

In the past, I always used to switch to console or log in through ssh, and do something like

DISPLAY=:0.0 evolution --force-shutdown

This is pretty annoying however, because

• I use drag and drop heavily when I'm sorting my mail
• so this bug happens more often when I'm sorting my mail
• but forcing Evolution to quit typically makes it lose all the state for which mails I've moved and where
• so I have to start over again and remember to expunge regularly

Today, I thought "what would happen if I start another evolution instance ?¨

So that's what I did, from the console, and bam - it Just Fixes It.  It's amazing how such a small change makes me so much less frustrated using Evolution.  Tied for the lead with the Cancel button.

I'm going to be an Evo bug avoidance master if I keep this up. Today's annoying Evo problem is "sometimes when you drag and drop mails, something gets stuck and...

Has anyone tried one of this nifty Bluetooth laser keyboards on Linux ? I'm assuming they would be using the standard HID stuff in Bluetooth, so there shouldn't be a problem, but it'd be nice if someone who tried it could confirm or deny before I shell out for it.

If it did work, my N800 + keyboard would be awesome to take with me to, say, a cinema, and be able to fix platform issues away from home.

Has anyone tried one of this nifty Bluetooth laser keyboards on Linux ? I'm assuming they would be using the standard HID stuff in Bluetooth, so there shouldn't be a...