Programming Is Hard
Partial Opera House View
The End of an Ear
I moved to a bigger apartment like five years ago. “Hey! Finally I can have access to all my precious belongings! Preciouses!!!”
But time passes, and I tend to accrue more precious belongings, so I have to start putting stuff down into the basement storage room thingie.
And I settled on the CDs. Since I rip everything to flac, I don’t really use the physical copies much. Only when I want to stare at the booklet.
There were rather more CDs than I had imagined, because I’d packed them really tight.
Which meant a lot of boxes.
Now I just have to carry 300kg (that’s about 9000 square pounds in Imperials, I think) down five floors.
Oy, my back.
End! User!
One Touch Maintainin’
Emacs gets a lot of very nice, but quite simple patches that take quite a lot of keystrokes to process. It’s hard on the fingers, and you always forget various bits.
So I wondered how simple it could be, and hacked up this workflow tonight.
You start in the debbugs-gnu buffer, as always, narrowed down to the patches with `C-u / patch’ and perhaps an `x’.
Select a likely message with `RET’.
Then the fun begins with the new `M-m’ command. It determines whether the patch is in the MIME attachments or just included in the message, applies it, and displays the diffs and possibly any rejected hunks. It also does a `compile’ in the lisp directory so that we see that things are OK.
Everthing is hunky dory, so we just hit `M-m’ again to go to the changed file.
Here we can imagine that we do some clean-up, but this patch is perfect, so we just hit `M-m’ again. This pops us into the ChangeLog with the correct user name, and the bug number appended. If the user has never had any non-“tiny change” code in Emacs before, “(tiny change)” is appended automatically.
But there’s one non-tiny change from this user before, so no (tiny change), and we just type in an entry.
Then `M-m’. This pops us to the top-level checkin buffer, filled out with the right data.
And then just type in a summary and `C-c C-c’, and you’re done.
Ok, it’s not a one click solution, but it’s better than… doing all this by hand.
Or using a web browser.