Interesting times ahead for FreeBSD

Ed Schouten’s MPSAFE-tty layer is now in the main tree of FreeBSD, but it i only one of the active projects which run in parallel. The excellent news is that the MPSAFE-tty layer brings down by one the count of kernel subsystems that require the big Giant lock for running within the threaded FreeBSD kernel. There are only a few more, i.e. the USB stack. Removing the requirement for Giant from some of the remaining Giant-dependent subsystems is already part of ongoing work.

A nice article about dVCS in the Enterprise

Bryan W Taylor posted a very intriguing writeup a bit earlier, titled:

`The Need for Distributed Version Control in the Enterprise‘

There are a few points of the article that seem a bit controversial. For instance, I am not sure I totally agree with the comments abouts “feature scoped” development.

.scm subdirs

I just stumbled upon an interesting Subversion bug.

Issue 707 on the bug tracker of Subversion is now several years old. It seems to be related to one of my personal pet peeves with Subversion: the use of `.svn’ subdirectories everywhere.

Mirroring the varnish-cache repository with svnsync

Quoting the Wikipedia about Varnish cache:

Varnish is a high performance HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites.

The main development repository of Varnish is very easy to browse, using Trac. You can see the latest changes through the web interface at:

http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/browser/

If you want to browse the history of Varnish when you are offline, a web interface doesn’t really cut it. You will have to somehow “mirror” the official repository.

OSS event #2 – Subversion and Mercurial

As threatened in an older post, the OSS team of the University of Piraeus pulled off yet another successful event two days ago. This event was dedicated to Source Code Management tools, and there were two presentations: first a presentation about Subversion (by Lampros Papadimitriou), and then a second presentation, about Mercurial, by yours truly.