Emacs 22.2 and version control

GNU Emacs 22.2 has added support for bzr (and others) to its version control module. Being able to get diffs, logs and annotations for the current file in the editor rather than using a separate shell is quite a win, and is what I'm used to in contexts where I still use CVS, so I'm pleased with this up to a point.

But...

Committing using the usual VC key binding only commits the current file. That's just about acceptable for underlying tools like CVS where there's no concept of a changeset, but it's completely useless for any modern version control system.

I see from the help for C-x v v that:

If you call this from within a VC dired buffer, and one or more files are marked, it will accept a log message and then operate on each one. The log message will be used as a comment for any register or checkin operations, but ignored when doing checkouts. Attempted lock steals will raise an error.

So might this be the workaround? To get a VC dired buffer you type C-x v d. Unfortunately the actual effect of this is at least several minutes of apparently fruitless disk activity (even when only three or four files have changed). Obviously even if this does ever terminate (I got bored waiting) it's not something you're going to do every commit.

(Yes, I've read the manual and looked for any variables to configure, not that either of these would be particularly sensible default behaviour. No luck.)

RMS recently wrote that:

The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages. Its intended result is a coherent operating system. It is particularly important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU packages. For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr.

Unfortunately it seems it's not really there yet l-(

They've changed it AGAIN

=== modified file 'scripts/setup.in'
--- scripts/setup.in    2008-01-19 12:28:31 +0000
+++ scripts/setup.in    2008-03-29 15:24:01 +0000
@@ -220,32 +220,32 @@
 case $os in
 Mac )
   # Apple don't seem to believe in creating a user as a discrete operation
-  if dscl / -read /Groups/$group >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+  if dscl . -read /Groups/$group >/dev/null 2>&1; then
     echo "$group group already exists"
   else
     echo "Creating $group group"
-    gids=$(dscl / -list /Groups PrimaryGroupID|awk '{print $2}')
+    gids=$(dscl . -list /Groups PrimaryGroupID|awk '{print $2}')
     gid=$(pick $gids)
     echo "(picked gid $gid)"

(etc etc). Amusingly this means their own example is now broken.

Last batch of ranting about Apple's hopeless approach to user creation.

More Leopard

I've enabled Time Machine. It took a few hours to back up 70GB or so to an external disk. It didn't back up the Windows XP partition; I'm not sure I approve but considering that as a separate machine and therefore organizing backups of some form separately is not something that actually bothers me that much.

Not much more to say about it at this point; it's rather in the nature of backups that you don't just enable them and know all you need to know...

DisOrder 3.0

From: Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk>
To: sgo-software-announce@greenend.org.uk
Subject: DisOrder 3.0
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:15:13 +0000

DisOrder 3.0 has been released.  This release adds a number of new
features.

( Read more... )