Greg's diary, recent entries

Saturday, 18 May 2013	Dereel	Images for 18 May 2013
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Winding down the house photos

Topic: photography, general

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My weekly house photos have become enormous. More and more, I'm going over to missing out many photos most weeks. So it was today, with the result that I had everything processed by lunch time. Somehow I didn't do much else all day long. Not as if a bit (or a lot) of garden work wouldn't be a good idea.

Enfield rainfall

Topic: general

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It's been raining a bit lately, and it occurred to me that one of the reasons we cooled off on the properties in Enfield was that I was concerned about how wet it would be there in the winter. So off to take a look. Result: no particular problem. I wonder if the evidence of raging torrents that we saw on 5 Inglewood Drive occurred in the really heavy rains that we had a couple of years back.

Sunday, 19 May 2013	Dereel
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Another power failure

Topic: general

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Another power failure this morning at 2:03.

Laziness and new houses

Topic: general

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I've been relatively lazy lately, much to the disgust of Peter Jeremy, who complained today that there's not enough to read in my diary. And I always thought it was too verbose. Today I did little. Yvonne found a newly listed house for sale in Tantaus Road, interestingly almost adjoining the property in Snowgum Road that we looked at a month ago. It looked quite good, and since it's only 1.5 km away, we went over to take a look from the outside. To our surprise it belongs to the Leahys, from whom we bought various things last year. The photos are really good; it makes the place look much better. They were in the garden, and though you're not supposed to speak to the sellers directly without the estate agent being present, it seemed rude not to say hello. They're moving to Ballarat for age-related issues. I wonder when we'll end up having to do that.

Getting my head around Subversion

Topic: technology, opinion

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I've been using revision control systems, notably RCS, for over 20 years, and for all sorts of things, including this diary:

$Id: diary.php,v 1.9 2013/05/20 00:55:21 grog Exp grog $

It's been 5 years since the FreeBSD project moved from CVS to subversion, but I haven't really done any merging until yesterday. That worked fine, but today's didn't. Followed the instructions and discovered that my source file (/usr/src/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3) didn't have any mergedata at all:

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/libc/stdio 5 -> svn propget svn:mergeinfo -R printf.3 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/libc/stdio 6 ->

Is this the first time that anything has been merged to this file? Tried the next step:

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/libc/stdio 6 -> svn merge -c r242738 svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3 printf.3 --- Merging r242738 into 'printf.3': U printf.3 --- Recording mergeinfo for merge of r242738 into 'printf.3': G printf.3

So far, so good. What does the mergeinfo look like now?

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/libc/stdio 7 -> svn propget svn:mergeinfo -R printf.3 - /head/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3:225808,225974,226066,226436,226604,226790,226836,227006,227023-227024,227070,227090,227416,227458,227622,227753,227755,227792,227807,227818,227999,228002,228040,228193,228199,228269,228322-228323,228329-228330,228528-228529,228531,228537-228538,228540,228630,228754,228875,228885,228921,228970,229766,229768,229848,230155-230156,230188,230429,230460,230613,230864,231118,231196,231236,231299,231505,231514,231616,231632,231724,231777,231813,231868-231869,231873,231902,232157-232158,232180,232385,232392,232497-232498,232503-232505,232582,232601,232620,232626,232926-232927,232929,232931,232935,232973,233002-233003,233012,233102,233106-233107,233130,233132,233138,233160,233173,233296,233300,233473,233512,233518,233600,233648,233770,233992,233994,234003,234057,234115,234131,234337,234528-234529,234536,234573,234578,234657,234700,234712,234714-234716,234769,234772-234773,234819-234820,234997,235140,235143,235202,235239,235266,235286,235739-235740,235767,235827,235848,236042,236288,236402,236582,236618,236695,236889,237061,237159-237160,237274,237286,237393,237409,237434,237523,237573,237660,237939,238182,238328,238599,238615,238667,238781,238802,238808,238835,238853,238919-238920,239150-239151,239345,239963,240107,240111,240132,240361,240385,240410,240412,241001,241010,241062,241137,241154,241373,241731,241844,241855,242429,242460,242738,242879,242894,242960-242961,243753,243758-243759,243779,244091,244401,244568,244679,244756-244757,245225,245256,245305,245308,245458,245841,246117,246476,246485,246617,246641,246809,246824,246952,247014,247050-247051,247596,248250-248252,248302,248672,248803,249471,249566,249739,249801-249802,249859,249956,249979,250209-250211,250412,250421 /projects/jailconf/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3:214121 /projects/largeSMP/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3:221273-222812,222815-223757 /projects/quota64/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3:184125-207707 /user/netchild/misc/src/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3:183949 /vendor/tzcode/dist/libc/stdio/printf.3:200830

That was more than I expected, to say the least. But svn diff shows exactly my change:

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/libc/stdio 8 -> svn diff printf.3 Index: printf.3 =================================================================== --- printf.3 (revision 250762) +++ printf.3 (working copy) @@ -277,7 +277,7 @@ A .Cm + overrides a space if both are used. -.It Sq Cm ' +.It So "'" Sc (apostrophe) Decimal conversions .Cm ( d , u , or Property changes on: printf.3 ___________________________________________________________________ Added: svn:mergeinfo ... merginfo all over again

Where did the other mergeinfo come from? Sent a message to the committers list and got back a very nicely worded reply that basically amounted to RTFM. Further up in the instructions was the admonition:

Never merge directly to a file.

Never, ever merge directly to a file.

Never, ever, ever merge directly to a file.

And I had read that, and even thought the repetition a little silly. So why did I do it anyway? Because that's the way our grandfathers did it with RCS. RCS is file oriented. CVS is too, really. But Subversion is change set oriented, and the mergeinfo is associated with the changeset, not with the file.

Pkgng: first impressions

Topic: technology, opinion

Link here

So now my ports are roughly up to date. Can I use Pkgng to keep them up to date? Read the instructions, which are still a little preliminary. The best entry point seems to be the Pkg Primer, though there's also a Handbook section. First you need to run pkg2ng, which takes quite a while, and produced about 4,500 lines of output, not all of it pleasant:

pkg_info: can't find package 'damageproto-1.2.1' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'compositeproto-0.4.2' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'ca_root_nss-3.14.3' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'bitstream-vera-1.10_5' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'cups-client-1.5.4_1' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'dbus-1.6.8' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'ORBit2-2.14.19' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'dconf-0.12.1_1' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'cairo-1.10.2_5,2' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'dbus-glib-0.100.1' installed or in a file! pkg_info: can't find package 'atk-2.6.0' installed or in a file! pkg: Skipping malformed dependency entry for damageproto pkg: Skipping malformed dependency damageproto pkg: Skipping malformed dependency entry for compositeproto pkg: Skipping malformed dependency compositeproto pkg: Skipping malformed dependency entry for ca_root_nss ...

At the end it came up with:

!!! Some packages failed to register !!! Please fix them by upgrading them or removing them or rerun "PERMISSIVE=yes pkg2ng" if you *really* must Failed packages: texinfo-5.1.20130419

OK, that's simple enough. Remove and reinstall:

=== root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 4 -> pkg delete texinfo-5.1.20130419 Package(s) not found! === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 5 -> pkg delete texinfo Package(s) not found! === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 6 -> pkg_delete texinfo-5.1.20130419 === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 7 -> pkg install texinfo Updating repository catalogue repo.txz 100% 1832 1.8KB/s 1.8KB/s 00:00 pkg: Package 'texinfo' was not found in the repositories === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 8 -> pkg install texinfo-5 Updating repository catalogue Repository catalogue is up-to-date, no need to fetch fresh copy pkg: Package 'texinfo-5' was not found in the repositories === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 9 -> pkg_add -r texinfo Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9-stable/Latest/texinfo.tbz... Done. === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports 10 ->

The third line (prompt 6) is subtly different: instead of pkg (Pkgng) it uses pkg_delete (old packages). That might be because it failed to register, of course. But pkg also can't find the remote packages. In other words, pkg doesn't seem to do anything useful—yet. Maybe it's related to the repository, but I didn't find a description of that. This was all in a virtual machine, and I had taken a snapshot before running pkg2ng, so I just restored it. I'll try again some other time.

This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. I try to leave the pages here for two days; you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall behind a day or two, you may find more here. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it.

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