Google Code: Migrating to Mercurial

Although one could have guessed otherwise, I’ve always been a happy Subversion user. Which former CVS user hasn’t? But now I’m ready to take the next step. For some of my personal stuff I’ve been using Mercurial for more than a year, so I thought it was time to take the plunge and switch my [...]

Subversion 1.5 Merging Massacres

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Subversion 1.5 on a medium sized project. Since there were more than 20 developers working on the project with some of them in a different country, there was no other way than to use feature branches extensively. We thought Subversion’s merge tracking would reduce typical merging errors [...]

Subversion: Externals Definitions

Externals definitions are a little known but very useful feature of subversion. Using an externals definition, you can create links to different parts of the repository (or even other repositories). Subversion clients then automatically check out the linked content into your working copy.

Understanding the find(1) Utility

The Unix find(1) utility is a powerful tool, yet few people really understand how it works. It may be a bit confusing at first, but a programmer who knows his boolean algebra should be able to wrap his head around the basic concepts without much trouble.

Reverting a Commit in Subversion

Once in a while, someone commits a revision that has to be rolled back later for some reason. Some teams do that as a matter of policy when people check in broken code that doesn’t compile or isn’t able to run all test cases successfully. Since Subversion (and similar revision control systems) are designed to [...]

SSH Public Key Authentication

A lot of people use SSH to log into remote hosts. SSH is secure and works well, but if you have to access many hosts with long, well-chosen passwords there is a lot of typing to do just for authentication.
In this article I’ll walk you through a basic public key authentication setup. Password authentication may [...]

From RCS to Mercurial

I’ve been a happy user of RCS for years (in fact, my software engineering course at university was held by Walter Tichy, the original author of RCS). The good old Revision Control System may be a dinosaur, but it served me well for my configuration files and scripts.
Over the last few years, however, new and [...]

Transparent Directory Encryption

In a previous article, I discussed sshfs, a user mode filesystem based on FUSE for accessing remote files. Another useful filesystem type is encfs which provides transparent encryption of directories. With encfs, files are stored encrypted in a special directory under encfs’ control. The encryption algorithm and password are specified during creation of this directory.