With apologies to Garbage, and with sniggers at Mark Hymers, I hereby present the latest techfilk from my perverted mind.

GNU Make is not enough

I know how to ant
I know how to scons
I know what to cook
And what to jam
I know when to imake
And I know when to myke
No one ever died from building too much

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

People like us
Know how to build code
There's no point in coding
If you can't build the app
We know when to fork()
And we know when to kill()
If we can't build it all
Then nobody will

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

I...i feel sick
I...i feel scared
I...i feel ready
And yet unprepared

GNU Make is not enough
But it is such a perfect place to start, my love
And if you're strong enough
Together we can make the world again, my love

GNU Make is not enough
GNU Make is not enough

Seen tonight on a talker I’m on:

mouse       :my mate is having problems with Vista. Is it usually crap?

Now, that just says it all.

John Goerzen recently made a positing about Git, Mercurial and Bzr in which he states “bzr doesn’t support tags and has no support for emailing changesets whatsoever”. Just so you know John, Bzr 0.15 is carrying a form of tags support written by Martin Pool and also has had for some time now support for bundles. Bundles are easily emailed around and can be used to merge from. The main Bazaar development list uses them for this. All you’d need would be a trivial plugin to allow you to mail the bundle from the command line. And that’s just needed if you can’t cope with bzr bundle | mail -s “Here’s the feature you wanted” recipient@domain. You can even use BundleBuggy to monitor a mailing list and look after merge requests.

Of course, tags are not actually needed for bzr. After all, in a repo, a branch is practically free, so simply making a branch for a release is easy enough, although I can understand a desire for tags from people who are used to them. As for sending changesets by email… bundles are easy, but I prefer to push my branch to my server and send a reference instead.

Sometimes I get to think of myself as my own person, independent in thought, word and deed.

Then every now and again, I’m reminded that I’m part of a braincell collective which controls my mind. As an example, here’s something which happened on sunday with a friend of mine while shopping for lunch…

Daniel: <thinking>mmm cranberries and macadamia nuts</thinking>
Lesley: mmm cranberries and macadamia nuts
Daniel: Stop giving voice to my inner thoughts goddamnit!
Random other shoppers: <intense-confused-stare />

And then something else occurs which just reinforces that actually we all live in the matrix and nothing we do is our own independant activity. Specifically I discovered that not only am I re-reading the same set of stories as my father right now, but when we discovered this, we also discovered that we’d both just finished exactly the same book in the series. ARGH