John Lindal’s Blog

Humans vs Computers

June 12, 2008 on 3:55 pm | In Computers, Programming | No Comments

Kudos to the Subversion team for building a command line client that produces output readable by both humans and programs!

This is not a common feature. gdb, which cries out for a graphical interface, doesn’t do it, despite the fact that all the output that it generates is highly structured. Its output is nearly impossible to parse. I should know, since I helped build Code Medic. RedHat chose to graft on an entire, new interface (MI2) when they decided to build a GUI for gdb.

Subversion

June 1, 2008 on 3:24 pm | In Programming | No Comments

After all these years, I’m thrilled to discover that I can still write applications on top of JX as fast as I can type. My graphical Subversion client is alive! Unlike the other ones that I have seen, my focus is the output of svn status, since I already have Code Crusader to provide a project view and System G to provide a tree view of the filesystem. I want to see what I have changed, not what I have checked out, and easily check in a subset of this list. I’ll eventually add a tree view of the repository, but never the working copy, since I can already invoke “svn log” from Code Crusader or System G.

I searched for existing ones before starting this project, but I only found two free ones, and neither would build on my stock RHEL5 system due to missing libraries. As Jamie Zawinski says, Linux is only free if your time has no value. I’m much happier writing my own — so it works the way I want it to work — than tracking down obscure libraries. I define “obscure” as not included by RedHat, a definition which will surely offend many, given the number of Linux distros out there and the wars over what should or should not be included in each particular distro. I should probably be numbered among the offended, since I haven’t heard of JX being part of any distro, but I really don’t care. I build statically linked binaries so my users don’t have to care either