Cycle 1.7.6, day #2 of week #6

Gave the final round of eyeballing to the list of topics that are still cooking, to categorize them into the ones to include in the upcoming release, and the ones to defer. Decided to postpone the streaming checkout topic to the next cycle, but did some benchmark to make sure it is sound.

Commented on 6 topics.
Queued 6 patches from 3 people.
Merged 12 topics to 'master' branch, to include in the next release.
Merged 6 topics to 'maint' branch, to include in the maintenance release.

Cycle 1.7.6, day #1 of week #6

Holiday but ended up working a bit on Git, some reading of list messages and a lot of re-reviewing of the list of topics in cooking to decide which ones to include in the upcoming release.
Commented on 7 topics.
Queued 3 patches from 3 people.
Merged 3 topics to 'master' branch, to include in the next release.
Merged 11 topics to 'next' branch for public testing.
Merged 3 topics to 'maint' branch, to include in the maintenance release.

Cycle 1.7.6, day #7 of week #5

Again, not much done, except for scanning the list traffic where I found nothing urgent. It is a long weekend in the US and I guess everybody is taking things slowly. I can afford to live slowly for a change, too.

Finished the initial machine tweaking of the FC15 bochs well enough to build and test "next" branch of git successfully (I am skipping t9xxx series but I have been skipping them on FC13 bochs for some time, so this is not a regression).

Drove to the airport and fetched my wife in the afternoon, and then helped her unpack.

A little bit of Fun with eBooks

I found this in a book I was reading: "His [Louis Pasteur's] reputation soared when he diagnosed a disease that had been decimating France's silk industry." The book didn't go into any details, as its topic was about later work of his, not about his work helping the silk industry.

But I got curious, so naturally this became my "Google a Day" topic. But I am unfocused when I am not working, and my attention wander around without bounds and easily stray into tangents.

"Louis Pasteur Silkworm" gave many hits. A Wikipedia article mentioned a silkworm disease called Pébrine but its description was a bit sketchy. I wanted to try something different today, so from the sidebar, I said "More", and picked "Books", and looked for "Silkworm Pébrine". There were many books listed, so I then narrowed them down with "Preview Available". There were still quite many books on the topic. I picked The culture of the mulberry silkworm, which is a bulletin issued by USDA in 1903.
 
It was an entertaining read.

Cycle 1.7.6, day #6 of week #5

Not much done today, other than throwing a "how about this" patch to fix a possible "show --quiet" regression and commenting on a few topics on the list.

No longer a youngster

I ended up wasting most of the day installing FC15 on a new VM. I used to feel thrilled and excited installing a new system on either a physical or a virtual hardware, but these days it no longer is an excitement, but just is a painful chore.

Last time I had to do this with FC13, NetworkManager got in the way, and this time they threw systemd in the mix. The casual desktop users who use the default system out of the box wouldn't need that kind of complexity, and they actively hurt somebody like me who simply wants to get a stupid non-X, fixed-address bochs with NFS mounted home directory without having to learn "the new and improved" way.

Needed to "systemctl enable/start sshd.service", same for rpc.statd.
Oh, and let's not forget SELINUX=disabled in /etc/selinux/config file.

Sigh, the price of progress...

Cycle 1.7.6, day #5 of week #5

Linus raised an interesting issue on the list. Nobody in the git tool-chain warns if somebody added a non-breaking space (UTF-8 c2a0) to the source code. A patch that has such a whitespace is not warned with --whitespace=warn, "git diff" will not highlight nor "git diff --check" will not complain.

But of course, gcc will complain.

Wrote a quickie 4-patch series to address this issue, but both Linus and I agree that it is dubious if git should be doing this as part of "whitespace breakage detection and fix" machinery.

Commented on a few topics.
Queued 16 patches from 7 people.

Cycle 1.7.6, day #4 of week #5

Lost about half a day yesterday as I felt very sick in the late afternoon and stayed in bed. But I was feeling much better today.

Merged a handful of topics to the master branch as they all seem to be in good shape. Also back-merged accumulated fixes that have been on master to maint to cut a new maintenance release v1.7.5.3. There still are a few large-ish topics that are cooking in next, but the list discussion seems to have found a good solution for the one I was most worried about (ab/i18n-scripts), so I am reasonably optimistic.

Among other topics, I am inclined to exclude the streaming write-out and postpone it until the next cycle.

Commented on ~20 topics.
Tagged v1.7.5.3.
Queued 35 patches from 6 people.
Merged 7 topics to 'master' branch, to include in the next release.
Merged 1 topic to 'next' branch for public testing.
Merged 14 topics to 'maint' branch, to include in the maintenance release.

Getting used to Blogger

I used to use LiveJournal but I was getting too many comment spam and switched to Blogger. I am not suffering from spam anymore (or not yet?). It could be just because not many people know that this blog exists (yet). Or perhaps Blogger is doing much better job than LiveJournal fighting spam. I don't know (yet).

One thing I very much like about this new location is that fairly detailed access statistics comes for free. It is fun to see accesses not only from North America but also from Japan and Europe, when readers are active, and whatnot. Also I notice that fairly large number of people used to come from planet.git-scm.com just after I switched here, but not anymore (for an obvious reason - they still point at the old LiveJournal site, whose last article was my announcement to move here).

The ads also come for free, but LiveJournal also had ads, so I think that it is not a huge regression. Looking at the access statistics from many different countries, I wonder if people are shown tailored ads depending on where they come from, and if their clicks are costing very different amount to the advertisers, things like that.

Git 1.7.5.3

The "master" front for 1.7.6 has been stabilizing, and a handful of topics have already been field-tested by real users. These fixes have now been back-merged for the 1.7.5.X maintenance branch, and the result is this release.

Nothing earth shattering, just a bunch of small bugfixes.