Vacation, and 5.04.

Vacation, and 5.04.

[Carsten Dominik]

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.

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.

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

- Carsten

[1] In particular Adam Spiers proposal for sublevel todo's (not
     sure yet if I find the keyword hierarchy useful, anyone?),
     Scott Jaderholms proposal for some level of integration
     with anything.el, Jost Burkhardts and Patrick Drechslers
     proposal to make export of a subtree more useful, Bastiens
     request to allow computation of properties


Changes in Version 5.04
-----------------------

* Details

   - `org-archive-mark-done' may be a string, to select the
     keyword that should be used.

   - New variables `org-export-author-info' and
     `org-export-time-stamp-file' to turn off inclusion of author
     and time information into exported files.  Thank to Patrick
     Drechsler for pointing out that this would be useful.

   - New variable to avoid moving DEADLINE and SCHEDULED info
     into the property drawer.  The default is now to *not* move
     this stuff into the drawer.
     `org-insert-labeled-timestamps-before-properties-drawer'
	This was requested by Bastien.

   - New command "j" in agenda to jump to an arbitrary date.
     Thanks to Bernt Hansen for the patch.

   - Minor bug fixes.



--
Carsten Dominik
Sterrenkundig Instituut "Anton Pannekoek"
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Kruislaan 403
NL-1098SJ Amsterdam
phone: +31 20 525 7477

Re: Vacation, and 5.04.

[Rick Moynihan]

Carsten Dominik wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

Hi Carsten,

Just a minor point, the links from the org-mode page still point to 
5.03, though 5.04 is downloadable at:

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~dominik/Tools/org/org-5.04.tar.gz

Have a good vacation,

R.

Re: Vacation, and 5.04.

[Georg C. F. Greve]

[-- Attachment #1.1: Type: text/plain, Size: 504 bytes --]

Carsten,

thanks for the release, and thanks to everyone for your work on the Org
mode, which I find to be one of the most useful Emacs packages on my
system. Have a nice vacation!

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve@fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)

[-- Attachment #1.2: Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 306 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/plain, Size: 149 bytes --]

_______________________________________________
Emacs-orgmode mailing list
Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode

Re: Vacation, and 5.04.

[Adam Spiers]

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

Org-mode development (was: Vacation, and 5.04)

[Carsten Dominik]

On Jul 20, 2007, at 17:28, Adam Spiers wrote:

> 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 ;-)

Now we are talking..... :-)

> 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.

Thanks for this enjoyable link - lots of fun to watch Linus like this.

I'd like to make some comments about the development model or Org-mode
and put it up here for discussion.

- Org-mode is part of Emacs - this means that I can only accept patches
   from people who have signed the appropriate papers with the FSF.  You
   might have noticed in the past that I usually don't simply apply a
   patch.  I change it considerably or re-implement the feature, to make
   sure that we will not run into copyright issues.  If you want to
   contribute to org-mode and make life easy for me, write to
   assign@gnu.org and ask for the paperwork to become a contributor to
   org-mode in Emacs, and let me know what you have done so so that I
   can start to use your patches directly.

- The second reason why I often don't apply patches exactly as submitted
   is because I see my role in filtering and shaping features so that
   they fit exactly into the feel and look of Org-mode as I see it.
   I don't want it to loose focus.
   You might see this as a good thing, but you could also see this
   as slowing down development.

- I have never used git or a similar distributed tool - so I would
   have to learn how to use them.

Thanks for your comments.

- Carsten

Re: Org-mode development (was: Vacation, and 5.04)

[Christian Egli]

Carsten Dominik <dominik <at> science.uva.nl> writes:

> I'd like to make some comments about the development model or Org-mode
> and put it up here for discussion.
> 
> - Org-mode is part of Emacs - this means that I can only accept patches
> 
> - I have never used git or a similar distributed tool - so I would
>    have to learn how to use them.

There are some benefits to distributed revision control. I used darcs for a
while to maintain my local patches against org-mode. IMHO the benefits are
mostly for other developers beside Carsten. They can more easily maintain their
local patches along with Carstens fast paced development. 

For Carsten there are probably not that many benefits, as he receives the
changes as patches and reworks them anyway. Maybe, say, he would trust Piotr
Zielinski (org-mouse) or David O'Toole (org-publish), then he could just pull
their newest version if they were to use the same system (that's many ifs).

As the development of org-mode is quite centered around Carsten anyway the
centralized model is probably an ok fit and not that much of a problem. External
developers can simply pull from CVS and keep their patches locally. As for the
adventurous there is also a mirror of the emacs CVS repository in arch and in
git (see the thread in http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/76259). A
little bit of googling will even reveal a mercurial repo at
http://hg.intevation.org/emacs.

HTH
Christian

Re: Org-mode development (was: Vacation, and 5.04)

[Adam Spiers]

Carsten Dominik (dominik@science.uva.nl) wrote:
> On Jul 20, 2007, at 17:28, Adam Spiers wrote:
> >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 ;-)
> 
> Now we are talking..... :-)

... and then we stopped - sorry for the long delay, I spent two weeks
on a beach myself and it has taken me rather too long to address the
resulting backlog :-)

> >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.
> 
> Thanks for this enjoyable link - lots of fun to watch Linus like this.

Here's an interesting follow-on - a reply from Linus to one of the KDE
maintainers who was still not convinced that a decentralized model is
always a benefit:

  http://lwn.net/Articles/246381/

> I'd like to make some comments about the development model or Org-mode
> and put it up here for discussion.
> 
> - Org-mode is part of Emacs - this means that I can only accept patches
>   from people who have signed the appropriate papers with the FSF.  You
>   might have noticed in the past that I usually don't simply apply a
>   patch.  I change it considerably or re-implement the feature, to make
>   sure that we will not run into copyright issues.  If you want to
>   contribute to org-mode and make life easy for me, write to
>   assign@gnu.org and ask for the paperwork to become a contributor to
>   org-mode in Emacs, and let me know what you have done so so that I
>   can start to use your patches directly.

I'd be happy to do this to save you work - though that is of course
making the big assumption that my patches are usable in their
unaltered form ;-)

> - The second reason why I often don't apply patches exactly as submitted
>   is because I see my role in filtering and shaping features so that
>   they fit exactly into the feel and look of Org-mode as I see it.
>   I don't want it to loose focus.

We are extremely lucky to have such a diligent and effective maintainer!

>   You might see this as a good thing, but you could also see this
>   as slowing down development.

If that's true, it *is* a good thing because otherwise I could hardly
keep up with the rapid pace :-)

> - I have never used git or a similar distributed tool - so I would
>   have to learn how to use them.

I can't speak for git, but one of the beautiful things about mercurial
is its simplicity; as a result, the learning curve is extremely
shallow:

  http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/QuickStart

There are a load of excellent docs too, e.g. 

  http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi
  http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbook.html

There's not much more to it for basic usage.  Pushing/pulling can be
done with remote repositories, e.g. via ssh or HTTP or even mail.
Releases can be symbolically tagged.  Merges are made painless.  A
built-in standalone web server lets anyone publish their repositories
instantly via 'hg serve', e.g. 

  http://www.adamspiers.org/hg/

A nice visual tool is bundled to help keep on top of even complicated
branching situations:

  http://lwn.net/Articles/140350/

I would argue that even when still sticking to a centralized
development model, it is still worth switching away from CVS or
similar:

  - Bidirectional syncing with CVS and other SCMs well supported
  - Atomic changesets
  - Robust repository format
     - including native cryptographic integrity checks
  - Renames done right
  - Symlink support
  - Branching and merging becomes painless
     - enables others even if you don't use it personally

I could go on but it's time to shut up now I think ;-)