From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:54:08 -0800 From: Roman Shaposhnik In-reply-to: <1a605cf7ccd9e5ba7aaf6f3ad42e0f4b@terzarima.net> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Message-id: MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; delsp=yes; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <1a605cf7ccd9e5ba7aaf6f3ad42e0f4b@terzarima.net> Subject: Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches? Topicbox-Message-UUID: 73c5f436-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Dec 26, 2008, at 5:27 AM, Charles Forsyth wrote: >> while a descriptive history is good, it takes a lot of extra work >> to generate. > > i've rarely found per-change histories to be any more useful than > most other comments, i'm afraid. I believe that it all depends on what is it that you look at source code for. Long time ago I used to study mathematics. Soviet mathematical schooling was really quite exceptional, but there was one thing that I now wish was different. You see, soviet math got a Bourbaki virus in its early childhood. And that meant that math texts and math teaching was all about polished final results. None of that messy and disgusting process of actually discovering those results. None. The process itself was considered too imprecise and muddy: "Rigor consisted in getting rid of an accretion of superfluous details. Conversely, lack of rigor gave my father an impression of a proof where one was walking in mud, where one had to pick up some sort of filth in order to get ahead. Once that filth was taken away, one could get at the mathematical object, a sort of crystallized body whose essence is its structure." From: http://ega-math.ru/Cartier.htm And thus the circle of those who "just got it" was formed. Back when I was a student, I wanted to belong to that circle so badly, that I missed a fundamental point: the very creation of the circle turned all of us from active participants in the process into art gallery goers. And that was a fine change for those who just wanted to appreciate fine math, but was a kiss of death for less gifted individuals who wanted to do math themselves (I won't touch the subject of whether less gifted individuals are supposed to do math in the first place, since its too personal and painful). Ok, with math it is a bit difficult to have the records of the process AND the final object at the same time (well, good teachers understood that and their lectures were the ones worth attending). But in software engineering we DO have a chance to have our cake and eat it too. Albeit only if we put as much focus on maintaining history (our records of the process) as we put on maintaing the code itself (final results). > the advantage of dump and snap is that the scope is the whole > system: including emails, discussion documents, > the code, supporting tools -- everything in digital form. if > software works differently today > compared to yesterday, then in most cases, i'd expect 9fs dump to > make it easy to track down the > set of differences, and narrow the search to the culprit. it might > not even be a source change, > but a configuration file, or a file was moved or removed. I don't deny that 9fs dump is quite useful and it seems to match the organization of Plan9 developer club pretty well. Personally, though, I'd say that the usefulness of the dump would be greatly improved if one had an ability to do ad-hoc archival snapshots AND assigning tags, not only dates to them. That would, in effect, bring the whole process quite close to what established SCMs do. With the only major feature (the ability to easily trade history between different hosts) still missing. Thanks, Roman.