Sunday, August 23, 2009

Mercurial for the Homeless

Generally, I'm not one to talk about crazy dreams. You know those ones right before you wake up that seem like a Salvador Dali painting? Anyway, I had one the other day where either I was homeless living out of a car, or I was observing someone like that. Anyway, it dawned on me in the dream that Mercurial (or any DVCS) would be perfect for that situation because I figured that the homeless person would only have intermittent network connectivity, but he still needed to get work done.
OK, maybe the part about someone living out of their car "needing" to get coding done is a bit crazy, but I already admitted that it was a weird dream. I suppose jet-setting open-source gurus might feel kinda homeless from time to time, and they do need to make use of their time on planes, so maybe it wasn't so crazy after all. And, when you get right down to it, the two use cases are more similar than different, and Mercurial and other DVCSs excel at it.
For the record, the rest of the dream was related to work I'm doing for a client converting from CVS to SVN without necessarily having shell access to the server machines. I thought of a zillion ways where I could do something trivially in Mercurial but SVN (without shell access) just kept kicking my butt. I just hope shell access comes through, so the dreams can cease.

Charles.

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