Chatting
YTalk is working on dark again! (dark is our clanlib
server). In the meantime though, more and more people have
started to regulary join our clanlib irc channel (#clanlib
on irc.openprojects.net), so while ytalk is truely superior
in some ways (it feels more alive when chatting with people
there), I won't go back and ytalk with sphair & starch.
Hanging out on an irc channel was originally done
primarily because our ytalk on dark wasn't functioning, and
I really hated using irc as a replacement. But now that a
few more people have joined the channel (japj and drivers
to mention a few), it has become A LOT more interesting and
useful. Working alone on a project can be very boring, and
although a mailing list is truely useful for detailed
communication, it just doesn't provide the same as
simultanously working together with other people on a
project. Working together with sphair and starch has always
been fun, but nothing compared to when you add more people
to the project, like now :)
I actually now WANT to work on clanlib,
whereas I for a long time felt it was something I owed to
myself.
Brutal Hacking!
So, many days have elapsed, but still we have hours left
of our 24 hour Brutal project - now how can this be? :)
The answer is that Kenneth Time Bender Gangstoe has
invented this genious system where we can halt the time.
Every time we found some issue in ClanLib, we halt the time
and repair clanlib. Sleeping is also a valid halt reason. :)
As for Brutal itself, we have gotten the basics of the
netobjects up and running (proof of principle). But the
game engine seriously sucks, and we need to work hard on
that one now - but after that I think we should have a good
example of how the netobjects can be used in practice.
Crappy CVS
CVS is a proggy that seriously could need a rewrite.
Kenneth (sphair) accidentially added 3
very big ogg vorbis (.ogg) music files to the repository,
and forgot to set the binary flag (-kb) when importing
them. This easy-to-make mistake has caused us to waste
HOURS because cvs simply TOTALLY breaks down because of
this. As of this writing, cvs still freezes on checkouts of
the Games/Brutal/Music directory.
I've beginning to be more and more serious about finding
an alternative to cvs, especially because CVS is so
unflexible in many other ways; and this isn't the first cvs
breakdown I've experienced. But there aren't that many
alternatives out there; either the alternative sucks by
being strickly file locking based (eg. Microsoft
SourceUnSafe), not crossplatform enough for our demands, or
having some fancy requirements causing us uneccesary extra
work.
The far most interesting one so far is BitKeeper, but I
seriously dislike their "open logging" policy; something
that really annoys me is these "open" projects that are
only free as in beer, but talk as if they were free as in
speech. Using a open sourced version control system isn't a
requirement in itself, but I truely hate programs that
report back to the creators of the program. This is in my
oppenion ABUSE of Internet, and should in my oppenion be
forbidden by law!
I'll probably not replace cvs just yet... unless I'm
unable to fix the Brutal repository. Completely replacing
the version control system is a big thing, and has to be
seriously considered before continueing. And I'm not
desperate enough to do that just yet... especially not when
the alternatives suck in one way or another...