Concern

All I can think of is “yeah, that was bound to happen,” and “damn, that is sure as hell self-congratulatory.”

OK, so I’ve given up on merging Classpath HEAD into my branch, or a release branch into my branch, because it just isn’t working. Instead, I’m going to continue with the branch I have, which I know runs well enough, and will just merge in Michael Barker’s scatter/gather NIO patch, since that’s the main thing that I need.

Sigh.

The thing about Apache Harmony. Well, there are a lot of problems with Apache Harmony, but the thing about Harmony that is going to be a real problem for them is that I don’t see any way for their development process to sustain itself. Which development process largely consists of batting their eyes and posting gibberish to mailing lists, and occasionally getting someone to donate chunks of code.

To that point, they should have called the project “Apache Panhandle,” because they aren’t interested in any kind of Harmony with any other free Java hackers.

And so Intel dropped a bunch of AWT code on them recently. This is a huge step forward for them, and the indication is that they’re at more that 80% of 1.4 compatibility. That’s really nice, and it’s a huge leap forward for them. But that excitement doesn’t cover exactly how they plan to finish that last 20% (and more like 30% for 1.5), especially since that last mile is really going to be the hardest one to cover. It’s always like that, and anyone reading this knows it, such that it’s kind of dumb and obvious to point it out — the last 10%, the last 1%, are going to be the hardest to finish and will take the most time. And if Harmony’s plan is to continue to wait for code donations to magically appear, they’ll happily remain at 80% until we all finally forget about them.

Roman also pointed out another thing that’s weird and unsustainable about Harmony’s development: that it mostly seems to happen in secret, with occasional giant code drops. How is that free or open? And more importantly, how the hell can you coordinate that? Managing disparate groups is hard enough; doing when no-one does anything in the open is even harder.

I’m done ranting for now :-).

X-Men: The Last Stand isn’t very good. The story had potential as being a really heavy end to the trilogy, filled with impossible angst and tragedy, but it’s just presented wrong. Chalk it up to poor direction, I guess. It really shows that Singer wasn’t responsible for this one.

I have a gut feeling that this was rushed out to bank off of what really is a great franchise (and a general mania over turning comic books into movies), and that Singer was too busy or too disgusted with the script or process to take part. Kind of sad.

Since Classpath is a GNU project, I’m stuck using CVS for source control. I so dearly wish that Savannah would start supporting Subversion, but if you suggest that they just tell you to use Arch, ’cause it’s so much better. I don’t want to use Arch.

But, what I’m posting this for is not to complain about CVS, or Savannah admins (well, maybe a little, but that’s just the teaser intro to the real post), but to ask a question: see, the jessie-nio branch was made a while ago, and I really want to update the parts of that branch with code from HEAD, which has had a lot of new features and bug fixes added to it in the meantime.

How do I do this? Google has been pretty unhelpful in answering this so far, and the CVS info pages suck mightily aren’t very thorough. How to I “re-branch” something? Is it as simple as

cvs up -j HEAD

while in the branch? Does this pick up new files added on HEAD?

(I asked this on IRC a while ago, and I think Tom answered. But I don’t remember what it was. I think the real answer is “copy the files from HEAD to your branch; commit,” but if there is a better answer, I’d like to know it!)