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...