Andrew Cowie has bullied me into attending FOSS.in 2005 after all. He made me realise what a shame it would be to miss this once-a-year opportunity to meet like-minded Free Software hackers from all over the place when it is happening right here in Bangalore. Of course it also helps to have supportive bosses to grant you leave from work for the period. So here's looking forward to meeting kindred souls. Thanks Andrew!
Subversion, Old Dog, New Tricks
It turns out that I do not need too much of extra disc space for working on trunk and gcjx-branch using SVN compared to CVS after all. This is because I used to always create a snapshot of GCC sources and use it as a working copy for fear of messing up my checked-out sources. Since SVN always keeps a copy of the pristine sources around (which is the major cause of the increased disc space usage) and it is easy and fast to use svn diff to figure out the damage and to use svn revert to restore sanity, I no longer need to continue with my weird model of development. It is also quite simple to just ignore everything from the GCC SVN repository except for the interesting stuff - for the gcjx-branch, my checkout only has the bare minimum stuff needed to bootstrap C, C++ and Java and run the libjava testsuite, while for trunk I have removed all the Ada stuff since I can't build Ada anyways. Of course, all this would probably have been possible with CVS as well, but there weren't nice instructions in the GCC Wiki for lazy souls like me for doing this with CVS.