Disqus - Latest Comments for William Tanksley Jr

Re: Shortcomings of Mercurial

William Tanksley Jr — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:24:09 -0000

Regarding merging tools on Windows: I installed the distro from http://mercurial.berkwood.com/, and it comes with all required tools. I didn't even know there was a bare-bones distro, although I knew it was possible to configure.

Re: Shortcomings of Mercurial

William Tanksley Jr — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:27:35 -0000

I have a question for a git guru.

Git looks really cool; I just found a Windows (mingw) port, so I'm happily working with it. It seems very slow, but I'm sure that'll go away with time. I love git-svn.

The question: is it possible to disable git's insertion of merge markers? I really like how Mercurial never alters a file; when a merge is needed, it's treated as a basic attribute of the repository, not a local problem in a file. This means it's NEVER possible to accidentally leave merge markers in a file (something I've had happen on several different CVS-using projects).

Re: Shortcomings of Mercurial

William Tanksley Jr — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:44:34 -0000

I'm not on my Mercurial computer, so I don't know what it ships with. The feature you're listing is a new feature of the core Mercurial, and doesn't describe the berkwood package. That one actually does come with all the graphical tools I've been able to ask for (i.e. everything seems to work out of the box; I've even played around installing tons of different plugins).

Re: Shortcomings of Mercurial

William Tanksley Jr — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:56:04 -0000

I'm glad to hear git doesn't try to be clever and detect the merge markers. I'll hold off until I figure out a way to get it to not insert the markers in the first place.

I think I found the mailing list at http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control....

Re: What is Big Government?

William Tanksley Jr — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:50:52 -0000

I dunno -- I'd consider this a big, but impotent, government. They have control of 100% of your income; the fact that they right now only take 1% of it doesn't imply anything about what they'll do tomorrow.

In fact, the best description I can think of for this situation is that this isn't a big or small government; it's an enormous nonprofit corporation. It lacks the one crucial element to make it a government: the legal monopoly on the use of force.

-Billy

Re: Are Libertarians Cheerier?

William Tanksley Jr — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 08:13:43 -0000

Cheerful? I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Or I have to change my reading list. The libertarian blogs I read talk endlessly about the sheer horror of the obstacles we face, how deceived everyone else is, and so on.

Almost none of them say ANYTHING about optimism, much less about how specifically to achieve the changes we want.

I'm an optimistic libertarian. I enjoy reading left, right, center, and libertarian writings. I like thinking of ways to solve things (while making money).

The rationales I see here for libertarian cheerieness would depress me if I believed them. I should be cheery because conservatives have a twinge when they vote for Bush, or because conservatives play dirtier than liberals? Please! Stop salivating; Pavlov's left the building. I should be cheery because I believe that people are basically good and don't need oversight? Then why do the people we have keep on setting up horrible oversight?

There's a much better reason to be cheerful -- it's because we're working for change, and we know what we're doing. I believe most of us know what we're doing, but most of us aren't doing anything.

So hop to it! Make those changes! And stop whining, for heaven's sake. It's not a political failure; it's a business opportunity!!!!

-Billy

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » How Things Change

William Tanksley Jr — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:38:51 -0000

I had one of these with a TRS80 model III someone gave me. Actually, mine was only 5MB, but it looked the same, just wider.

Re: OhGizmo! » Archive » The Wind-Turbine Cellphone-Charging Taxicab

William Tanksley Jr — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:43:44 -0000

You guys should be expecting the inefficiency; read the cited purpose: "The initiative is intended to promote the use of clean energy in the context of the Kyoto Protocol."

In that context, it's all about looking good by doing SOMETHING, no matter how ineffective.

Re: Fine. Git is Awesome.

William Tanksley Jr — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:47:52 -0000

As a committed Mercurial user and fan, I have to admit: well said. Git does many things better. Right at the moment Mercurial is better on Windows, so any cross-platform project needs to carefully weigh the options, but I find Git's current feature set to be more capable.

Also notable... Although Mercurial's historical refusal to deeply support history rewriting is well-principled and reasonable, Git's support for it is actually sensible given Git's architecture. It turns out that while Mercurial is built on the idea that a version control system should remember differences (and reconstruct the actual files), Git is built on the idea that a version control system should only remember files (and store differences only to save space). Thus, when you edit a Mercurial history you're forcing Mercurial to alter the most important data it has; when you edit a Git history you're merely changing some files (usually only removing files), no different (in principle) from checking in a branch.

Mercurial's architecture makes perfect sense, and gives it a huge head start in speed and size; but Git's architecture really does preserve the things that matter most (the actual files), which makes inherently risky things like rewriting history relatively risk-free.

Thumbs up to Git for a flexible and sensible architecture.

I'm still using Mercurial for its superb Windows support (sorry, guys, gotta use it); but I'm keeping my eye on Git. (By the way, aside from extreme slowness, Git also hasn't gotten git-svn working reliably on Windows -- at least not while I've been watching.)

Re: Fine. Git is Awesome.

William Tanksley Jr — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:49:54 -0000

That's not entirely accurate... msys is a set of libraries to allow POSIX applications to (sometimes) run on Windows. Its entire intent was to get rid of the "compatibility layer" problem with cygwin.

I'm not saying you SHOULD be using msys or git; but I am saying that using it is no worse than using any other large, multiplatform library. Certainly Qt would be no better, for example.

There are better reasons; for example, one might dislike the atrociously slow performance of git on Windows after seeing so many people advertise its speed as being one of its best features. Perhaps one might dislike its slapdash implementation in an odd mixture of bash, perl, and C. (And probably others.) I would share those dislikes.

Re: Tierney, Simon, and 300 Million Resources

William Tanksley Jr — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 10:29:59 -0000

The end of this essay referred to the gloom'n'doomers as "Malthusian". From what I've read (I haven't read Mathus' works, but I've read much of Mises, who cited him frequently), Malthus was more of a classical economist, and believed that human behavior would adjust itself to the restrictions, thus preventing a breakdown.

Was Mises taking Malthus out of context? Or perhaps should the adjective be "Ehrlichian" ("the population bomb") rather than "Malthusian"?

-Billy