Re: Vacation, and 5.04.

[Adam Spiers <adam@spiers.net>]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2007 at 03:41:25PM +0200, Carsten Dominik wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am going to be offline for about 3 weeks.  Thanks to
> all of you for another year with a lot of fun here on
> emacs-orgmode, I certainly get a kick out of this.

I just joined this list a few days ago and was delighted to find such
an active community, which I'm sure has had a lot to do with your
participation.  Hope you enjoy a well-deserved rest!

> On my website I have put version 5.04 of org-mode, it contains
> the latest bug fixes, but hardly any new features.  As an exception
> I am *not* uploading this version to CVS Emacs, to avoid the risk
> that there will be a deadly bug that I cannot fix for 3 weeks.
> 
> I know that there are a few bug reports and feature requests[1] that
> I have not yet adressed.  I will try to get to these after the break.
> Please continue to report issues and to share your ideas here.
> I will try to catch up later - even though, with the current flux
> of posts (I love it), this will be daunting task.

This might be a pertinent moment to bring up the topic of revision
control ... or actually it might be a particularly bad moment,
considering that the maintainer is about to vanish for 3 weeks!  But I
wanted to propose the idea of adopting a distributed revision control
system.  This would allow any individual coder to (amongst other
benefits) easily create short-term feature branches or bugfix branches
off Carsten's releases, share them publically with others for testing,
and enable very low-cost merging back into the mainstream.  To use the
current situation as one example, this would mean that Carsten can
relax happily on the beach (or wherever he is ;-) knowing that his
absence is guaranteed *not* to hold any progress back, even if he
decided to stay there for several months ;-)

In case anyone's unfamiliar with the benefits of distributed revision
control (vs. centralized, e.g. CVS/svn), enjoy this great talk by
Linus Torvalds at google:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

It claims to be about git, but actually it's more about distributed
revision control systems in general - everything he says applies to
similar systems such as mercurial.

> Enjoy the summer (if you are on the northern hemisphere....)

I am, but still waiting for it to stop raining :-(

Cheers,
Adam