Well, the new version of the software for this website is nearly done. I'm onto muse generation now, having got the scary make file and perl file generator done.

Of course, you could ask the question why not switch to wordpress or blogger or the like? Well, at the end of the day, I have to have an offline tool. Also, I like to have all my source files locally. All my electronic work is based around a single directory, and everything is in there. I guess that I am far from being a convert to the cloud.

It's probably going to take a few weeks yet, though. There should be only a few visible changes; first I am moving toward tags rather than categoies. I will be adding more than the current four. This means the individual RSS feeds — there will be only one. I doubt that anyone will mind this, but should if not.

My experiences with bazaar continue. I've used it to version my new blog software and, also, all my course notes from this years teaching. I've had one inexplicable crash (it core dumped everytime I tried to init one directory). In general, though it's really nice. It feels like going back to RCS in some ways. You don't have the SVN and CVS nightmare of importing a new project which tends to involve moving existing files out of place, then checking them out back into place.

I haven't actually tried any of the distributed facilities yet; it's all just me for which SVN was always overkill anyway. It's nice to know that I will have the option when I get to it.

My adversary even responded to my email which ended with "I think it's time to stop this". I replied with an email saying "But I am going to get the last word". He replied to this as well.

He's turning out to be quite a nice guy; he's accused me of "displaying an incredible ignorance of the FLOSS community" — my reply was that I just didn't know what the acronym was and that this was probably a good thing.

Although, I'm really quite warming to the guy, there is a problem here. I like to witness the development of a community, but in many cases this seems to result in introversion and worse still exclusion. Regularly developing a pile of acronyms, like the tendency to generate new jargon in science, just services to exclude people. Having switched between quite a few different disciplines, I've been on the wrong end of this tendency to find a clear reason why someone else doesn't belong. "Ah, but our community isn't like that", "We're not the same as them though, so how can their solutions be of value?", "But you don't understand how we do things". It's a shame and it saddens me that people who are essentially good should still fall prey to it.

I managed to find a solution to the problems with Bazaar; the problem is that vc-bzr.el launches "bzr" which is a python script; the cygwin version uses a magic shebang line which doesn't work on windows outside of cygwin. So, firstly, I fixed the problem in vc-bzr.el by making it launch the python executable directly and then pass "bzr" as an argument; I sent this into the Emacs Bug List. I got a reasonable reply from Stefan Monnier suggesting a wrapper script; I kind of agree that it's a nicer solution (it works with DVC too!), although it still leaves users in the situation of vc-bzr.el not working out of the box.

So I sent a report into the cygwin mailing and got replied with a blank no from the wonderful Christopher Faylor; just use cygwin or it's "do whatever you like". Meanwhile, off-list, I've been soundly castigated by another cygwin mailing list subscriber who has advised me "PCYMTNQREAIYR" and really doesn't like my quotation style. I never understood speaking with acronyms since I first met it in Perl land; but, hey, TMTOWTDI.

Some wonderful sections of the email conversation include:

  him> you can't be bothered to take 15 seconds to look something up, why
  him> should I be bothered to talk to you?

I don't know. And yet you are.

Astonishingly, he replied to this. It's been an entertaining conversation, but I think it's time for it to finish; I am hoping that this will work.

  him> I also care when you blatantly disregard the accepted practice of a
  him> community, and refuse to listen to members thereof when they try to
  him> tell you you're behaving in a way that is, by their standards,
  him> inconsiderate.

So bug reporting is inconsiderate? For the record, by the standards imposed by
my community, preaching at people is considered rude. I saddened that you
blatantly disregard these standards. But, hey, I'll get over it.

  him> A simple "I agree to abide by the list etiquette when posting to the
  him> list" would have ended this conversation long ago.

Yes, but then this conversation has been an entertaining diversion from my
otherwise dull and pointless existence which I would have been sad to miss.

I don't think I've ever received such a response for an attempt to publish a bug report. I guess some people need to just get out more; in this case, I mean me, but it's just about the start of term and that's not likely to happen.

I've started to give bazaar a go in anger; my hope was that I could get the offline advantages of RCS, with a newer system (renaming and such like) as well as something that works for collaboration.

The emacs support is a bit primitive yet. There is a vc-bzr.el, though, so I tried this but it didn't work. This turned out to be because it doesn't work with cygwin out of the box. I've tried the windows version and it all seems to behave nicely. But it doesn't understand symlinks which is a major pain — I need those symlinks!

Life can be hard at times.