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| Tuesday, 21 May 2013 | Dereel | |
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Another new house?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
Round to Tantaus Road this morning to meet with estate agent Phil Hayward and look at the Leahy's house. It's not obvious from outside, but in fact it's quite nice. But it seems that any house I buy between now and my 65th birthday (end of September) will attract in the order of $15,000 to $20,000 “Stamp duty” for the transaction; after my 65th birthday it will drop to roughly 0. So it's not a good time to buy houses.
After that, Phil came around to our place. Once again we had the case of a Really Impressed agent, who agreed with the others about what we could get for the house. I'm left wondering why we really want to move.
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Network problems solved?
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I can't say that my network connection has been good at any time this year, but the last 5 days were better than average, and the link stayed up the whole time. That was too good to last: round midday today things got worse again, including a lot of this kind of message, which I don't see very often:
My best bet is that this is an indication of poor reception, but the reported signal strength was better than average. Possibly it's related to my TV reception problems, though I didn't have any of those today.
So it was good to receive a message from Scott Weston: VCAT has rejected Wendy McClelland's objection to the radiation tower: it can go ahead. Hopefully it'll be done soon.
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Subversion POLA
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Topic: technology | Link here |
I'm still puzzled by my problems merging fixes with subversion. Started again by checking out a complete source tree on one of the FreeBSD project machines, not helped by the flaky network, and then trying the merge the way it's supposed to be. First, which revisions do I need?
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/1) ~/9/usr.bin/locale 5 -> svn mergeinfo --show-revs=eligible svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/locale
OK, then the merge command should be:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/1) ~ 21 -> svn merge -r242743:r243202 svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/locale 9/usr.bin/locale
Why the conflict? Still, selecting “theirs-conflict” should mean “in case of conflict, take the version in head”. And, sure enough, it accepted the update. Correct? To compare it, I copied the files to my local machine, where I have a copy of head checked out. The results weren't quite what they should be:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/9/usr.bin/locale/freefall2 124 -> diff -wu locale.1 /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/usr.bin/locale/locale.1
Why is that?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) /src/FreeBSD/svn/head/usr.bin/locale 10 -> svn blame locale.1
So the missing lines are from revision 242743, the first revision that I had specified. And looking more carefully at the merge command, I see:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/1) ~ 21 -> svn merge -r242743:r243202 svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/locale 9/usr.bin/locale
So this is a violation of POLA. -r242743:r243202 excludes revision 242743. It seems that to do it right I should have written -r242742:r243202. To check that I need to blow away the checkout and start again, since even if I remove the modified files, svn's metadata claims that they've been applied. And just checking out the tree takes a couple of hours. Mañana.
| Wednesday, 22 May 2013 | Dereel | Images for 22 May 2013 |
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Subversion: solution
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
So it seems that my problems with subversion were due initially to my misinterpretation of the -r switch: the form -r242743:r243202 excludes revision 242743. Does it work correctly if I write -r242742:r243202? Potentially not, since revision 242742 doesn't relate to these files. Spent another hour checking out the source tree and tried it. Success!
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/8) ~ 15 -> svn merge -r242742:r243202 svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/locale 9/usr.bin/locale
So far, anyway. Committing was a different matter:
=== grog@freefall (/dev/pts/8) ~/9/usr.bin 16 -> svn ci locale
Huh? Oh, yes. Since the security incident last year, we no longer keep private keys on freefall. That means that I couldn't use svn+ssh to connect to the repository, so I used svn as well. But I couldn't check in that way. Reluctantly decided to check out the complete repository on eureka, my local machine. To my surprise it took hardly any longer than it did on freefall, and though it checked out a total of 1.4 GB of data, it only caused about 300 MB of network traffic. But things still didn't work:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /src/FreeBSD/svn/stable 150 -> svn merge -r242742:r243202 svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/locale 9/usr.bin/locale
That's what comes from copying and pasting: The message didn't help, but I still had svn instead of svn+ssh. After changing that, it finally worked.
So: what have I learnt?
Understand that the -r range excludes the first revision.
There are many ways to merge changes. They all seem to work, but they place the metadata in different places, making it difficult to keep the repository tidy. This is part of the background of the admonitions in the instructions
Understand that you can't hack around on a checked-out repository. Once you merge, you're stuck with it, because there's no way to reset the metadata and start again.
I find last two points a great disadvantage of subversion. It's too easy to make mistakes, and almost impossible to recover from them.
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Installing the latest FreeBSD stable
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Topic: technology | Link here |
So finally I have a relatively up-to-date installation of FreeBSD and ports on a virtual machine. Now I should be able to copy it to other machines to upgrade them. For some years now I've maintained two root file systems, including /usr: the one I'm using and the one that I can use to upgrade, which I mount on /destdir. The file systems look like this, and you simply boot from the appropriate partition:
So yesterday I copied the new system to the alternate partition on teevee, my TV computer, and tried booting from it. That involves modifying the /boot/loader.conf file on the first partition, to tell it which partition to boot from. For some reason I had this in there:
That's wrong: it should have been disk0p4. So I had to manually correct it, after which the system came up relatively well; only the remote control didn't work, something that always seems to happen. So I reverted to the old system to watch TV last night. Today corrected /boot/loader.conf and tried again. Not what I expected:
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What's that? Line 1016 of /usr/src/sys/boot/common/module.c is the very last line, so it's not clear what really happened here. It also happened before I got the loader prompt, so there was just no way to start the machine. Took the disks and put them in monorchid, my test machine, where I was able to boot from another disk and examine things. After some testing, discovered that it was directly the result of specifying the correct partition! If I specified the wrong one and then corrected it, it would work without any trouble.
So what's the problem? loader too old? More investigation needed, but I want to do it without the danger of not being able to watch TV in the evening. Once again mañana.
| 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. | Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
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