blog/archives/2006/09zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2006/09/zack's home pageikiwiki2009-11-28T12:00:16Zxs-x-vcs-XXXhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2006/09/xs-x-vcs-XXX/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2006-09-21T09:59:50Z
<h1>Document the VCS of your packages!</h1>
<p>A long story short: have a look at <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vim">vim's PTS page</a> and try to
spot the <em>VCS</em> link at the end of the "General Information"
information box.</p>
<p>You like it? Be happy then, since <em>you can have it</em> on
your packages too. Just go and add something like the following at
the end of the source section of your debian/control:</p>
<pre><code> XS-X-Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-vim/trunk/packages/vim
</code></pre>
<p>instead of "Svn" you can actually use "Baz", "Darcs", "CVS", and
plenty of others. Oh, and you can of course see the field even with
plain apt-cache of course:</p>
<pre><code> zack@aquarium:~$ apt-cache showsrc vim | grep -i vcs
X-Vcs-Svn: svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-vim/trunk/packages/vim
</code></pre>
<p>The whole point of this is indeed in letting your users know
where to find the cutting edge code for your packages, where to
look for stuff tagged pending in the BTS and so forth. Be kind to
your users, add the field.</p>
<ul>
<li>kudos to <a href=
"http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/blog">Dato</a> for <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/07/msg00227.html">pioneering
the idea</a></li>
<li>kudos to <a href="http://www.ouaza.com/wordpress">Raphael</a>
for timely applying my tiny teeny patch to the PTS implementing
this</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> <a href=
"http://liw.iki.fi/liw/log/">Lars</a> asked me a list of
<em>supported VCS</em>, you can find it at the end of <a href=
"http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/qa/trunk/pts/www/bin/common.py?op=file">
trunk/pts/www/bin/common.py</a> in the <a href=
"http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/qa">qa svn repository</a>, look for
"vcs_table".</p>
hello worldhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2006/09/hello_world/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2006-09-20T16:54:38Z
<h1>Hello (ikiwiki), World!\n</h1>
<p><a href="http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net">ikiwiki</a> succeeded where
other competitors failed: convincing myself to set up a blog. This
is the unavoidable <em>"Hello, world!\n"</em> post. Thanks <a href=
"http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/index.html">Joey</a> for this
valuable piece of software, I love the subverted wiki concept and
I('m starting to) like also the <a href=
"http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax">markdown
syntax</a>.</p>
<p>Still, the experience in setting up the blog has not been
painless, here are some rough edges I haven't yet addressed with
ikiwiki (IOW <em>dear lazyweb</em> section from now on):</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>working offline and then commit is fine, but I would have loved
the usual draft->publish release cycle of many blogs. More
generally I'm missing a way to hide pages in ikiwiki. Ok, hiding
stuff it's not in the wiki spirit, but it is definitely in the
spirit of VCS to commit as often as possible to avoid losing
work!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>markdown syntax is not supported per default in the current
<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/vim">vim</a> in unstable. I
found a <a href=
"http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1242">vim syntax
extension for markdown</a>, ... /me is going to add it to the vim
package in unstable (or at least to <a href=
"http://packages.qa.debian.org/vim-scripts">vim-scripts</a>, not
sure yet).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>when writing post offline the "preview" feature is desirable as
much as it is when writing online. Thus my first setup involved
running ikiwiki on my laptop and then sync the result on the
machine serving the page. Unfortunately, ikiwiki seems to be meant
to be run on the final machine (for example: the ikiwiki.cgi is a
arch specific code generated for the machine executing
/usr/bin/ikiwiki). My current solution is then to run ikiwiki both
on the machine I use to write posts and on the machine serving this
blog ... better ideas?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>a couple of minor nuisances (the dates at the bottom of posts
shown in Italian format, and all links in the RecentChanges page
broken if I dare rebuilding with --rebuild). But hey, I know, it's
free software, I'll eventually try to come up with a patch for
these!</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Again and nonetheless, <strong>kudos to Joey</strong> for
ikiwiki, it rocks!</p>