darcs conflicts faq

Pekka Pessi and I have put together an FAQ on the darcs conflict problem. It has three major sections:

1. Everyday conflicts: what conflicts are and how you should deal with them in the general case.
   
2. The big conflicts bug: what it is, how you can avoid it, and what to do if you have run into trouble.
3. Darcs 2.0: from a user perspective, how it will change from darcs 1.x (not very much), and what resolving conflicts might look like (rollback will play a bigger role). David has been making some great progress. Nevertheless, our best estimates are that we will be ready for alpha testing only in Feb 2008, and release by the second quarter of that year.

There may be some mistakes or gaps in the FAQ, but I hope that you will find it useful.

Pekka Pessi and I have put together an FAQ on the darcs conflict problem. It has three major sections:

1. Everyday conflicts: what conflicts are and how you should deal with them in the general case.
   
2. The big conflicts bug: what it is, how you can avoid it, and what to do if you have run into trouble.
3. Darcs 2.0: from a user perspective, how it will change from darcs 1.x (not very much), and what resolving conflicts might look like (rollback will play a bigger role). David has been making some great progress. Nevertheless, our best estimates are that we will be ready for alpha testing only in Feb 2008, and release by the second quarter of that year.

There may be some mistakes or gaps in the FAQ, but I hope that you will find it useful.

darcs conflicts faq

getting things done with mutt 3 (action counter)

Here's a short tip for putting a reminder on your desktop wallpaper of how many next-action and waiting-for messages you have. The result looks like this:

ACTION:  4
WAITING: 1

The approach is to combine a small shell script with the wonderful GeekTool program for MacOS X (similar programs exist for Linux, I'm sure). GeekTool lets you display arbitrary text, say console text on your Desktop. One of my GeekTool windows is set to run the script and display its results with a big red font.

The shell script is pretty dumb; it just counts the number of files in my Maildir directory. I guess if you're using the mbox format, you'll have to find some other way to count messages. Count the number of instances of '^From: ', maybe?

#!/bin/sh

# $2 is just for padding
function count_messages (){
  echo -n "$1:$2"; ls -1 ${HOME}/Mail/current/$1/cur | wc -l
}

count_messages ACTION " "
count_messages WAITING

I'm not expecting this to have a huge impact on my productivity, but maybe this will be that extra little bit that counts.

Edit 2007-10-25Fixed counting to account for empty boxes. Zero. We like that number.

Here's a short tip for putting a reminder on your desktop wallpaper of how many next-action and waiting-for messages you have. The result looks like this:

ACTION:  4
WAITING: 1

The approach is to combine a small shell script with the wonderful GeekTool program for MacOS X (similar programs exist for Linux, I'm sure). GeekTool lets you display arbitrary text, say console text on your Desktop. One of my GeekTool windows is set to run the script and display its results with a big red font.

The shell script is pretty dumb; it just counts the number of files in my Maildir directory. I guess if you're using the mbox format, you'll have to find some other way to count messages. Count the number of instances of '^From: ', maybe?

#!/bin/sh

# $2 is just for padding
function count_messages (){
  echo -n "$1:$2"; ls -1 ${HOME}/Mail/current/$1/cur | wc -l
}

count_messages ACTION " "
count_messages WAITING

I'm not expecting this to have a huge impact on my productivity, but maybe this will be that extra little bit that counts.

Edit 2007-10-25Fixed counting to account for empty boxes. Zero. We like that number.

getting things done with mutt 3 (action counter)