Monday, April 19, 2004

Version Control Free Association I want to like arch. I want to have mirrored repositories on each of my VMs, do disconnected version control when hacking offline and sync up with a centralized, backed-up repository whenever I'm on the net. But subversion+RapidSVN||TortoiseSVN is just so easy. arch punishes me for having clients who deploy windows servers because of extremely arbitrary path conventions. I haven't figured out mirroring subversion repositories yet, but I suspect that it will happen sooner than Arch looses it's cross-platform rough edges. Ugh -- the injustice of it all. David Wheeler, backs me up in a rather thorough review of CVS, Arch and Subversion. Lack of Win32 support limit arch's applicability to people who only ever do unix code ever. Well, those are my words , but a reasonable paraphrase. He overlooks Bram's Codeville, which I expect great things from. Though not as mature as arch and subversion, Bram's braminess + python's radness + the catchy name should mean imminent feature parity. More on Arch: Win32 arch bounty proposed - http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-arch-users/2004-03/msg01210.html Win32 ports of Arch (not sure why bounty required... I guess these aren't complete?) - http://wiki.gnuarch.org/moin.cgi/Native_20WIN32_20Support Grokking Arch - http://web.verbum.org/tla/grokking-arch/grokking-arch.html 7:14:38 PM      comment []  trackback []

Everyone's doing virtualization http://www.twoostwo.com/ is a new virtualization product. I think it was written by a contract programming house so that IBM's OS/2 could run useful software, or run *on* widely used host software, but it's not really clear from the websites. It supports more hosts (more than anyone?): FreeBSD, Windows, Linux. Their site has a really good 'competitors' section detailing other virtualization products/projects (but no mention of CoLinux). Using OS-level virtualization to distribute niche OS's doesn't require too much imagination at this point. I'm hoping some of the vendors in this soon-to-be completely commoditized field will start innovating at the feature level and not just strive for eking an extra few cycles out of the host CPU or adding support for more and more esoteric OS platforms. I'm looking forward to using OS-level virtualization to help distribute niche *applications*, ones you download and double-click on to run, but I haven't seen examples of it yet. Or, hopefully someone will implement a more secure executation environment than running your apps directly on a host OS, doing traffic analysis of virtualized OS calls, etc, so that spyware and adware could be heuristically identified and controlled. I don't think you absolutely need virtualization to make this happen, but I suspect you get a useful product much sooner. 1:39:32 PM      comment []  trackback []