aaronkaplan

I wouldn't go so far as to say that you should be forced to perpetuate the system. You didn't choose where you were born, and if you think the system in place there is wrong you should be free to leave. But you've benefited from the generosity of others, and now by moving to a country where it's cheaper to do business precisely because it doesn't offer its people the same advantages that Germany does, you're ducking out of repaying that debt. Have you thought about other ways to pay it back? Or do you consider the previous generation to be suckers for paying your way without making you sign a contract first?

Update: now the whole spreadsheet is completely blank.

It's kind of funny that of all the post-CVS version control systems, the one that calls itself "subversion" is the one that hews the closest to the traditional paradigm.

Personally, I hate when applications like rhythmbox crowd the notification area. There is no event involving rhythmbox that I will ever want to be notified of. "I'm still playing that song. Still playing. Still playing. OK, now it's over." Gee, thanks. I figure if an application has nothing new to tell me, it should stay over in the taskbar with all the other ones.

But indeed, a notification icon can do things that a taskbar entry can't. Notably, the context menu in the taskbar is defined by the taskbar, not the application, so things that take one step with a notification icon take two or more via the taskbar.

So now I think the problem isn't the notification area, it's the taskbar. Maybe if the taskbar worked better, developers wouldn't pollute the notification area so much.

Originally subversion couldn't do this, but it has had merge tracking since version 1.5 (a couple of years already). You can now merge one branch into another multiple times without specifying explicitly which revisions to compare.

I have seen a number of people saying that the merge tracking in subversion still isn't as good as what's in git or mercurial, but I haven't found an explanation of the difference. Can someone elaborate, or point me to some good reading?

lallysingh and nollidge point out that in a DVCS model you tend to make more frequent commits, because committing and publishing are no longer the same action, and that having finer-grained commits makes automatic merging more likely to succeed. This seems quite plausible to me, but it's orthogonal to the problem of merge tracking (isn't it?).

Me too. Unfortunately, I also tend to like how women look in high heels.

I have a lot of cognitive dissonance about fashion in general. It disgusts me that people buy new clothes even though they have old ones that are still perfectly functional, but despite this disgust, I am sometimes one of those people. When I'm dressed well (which includes, among other things, being not too far out of date), I feel better about myself, but then I feel stupid for letting myself be manipulated for profit by the fashion industry.

I know a couple of women who have such a strong aesthetic sense that they can look good without being trendy. I have a lot of respect for that.

Also, you didn't address the gp's complaint that the build tool will spontaneously update not only the project dependencies, but also itself. Some maven plugin developer out there can release a new version, and a project that compiled fine yesterday suddenly won't compile anymore. I'm sure there's a way to force it to use particular versions of the plugins as well, but by the time you explicitly list every transitive dependency and every plugin used in every phase of the lifecycle, you've got a really big configuration file, especially for a tool whose motto is "convention over configuration." Not to mention that if you accidentally forget to specify a version number for one of these potentially dozens of packages, maven will happily default to using the latest version, which makes your build secretly nondeterministic.

But I worry about cloud-to-cloud backup services like this. If a major email provider goes down, all of its users will be trying to retrieve their backups at the same time. What are the chances the backup service will actually be able to handle this traffic? It's like a run on a bank.

That is how it works. In the US local calls are free, and his mom pays all $0 of it.

That takes nothing away from darcs as a piece of software, though. You don't have to understand the theory in order to use the tool, and it really introduces a revolutionary way of thinking about version control.