The Jackal Rants

Well, it’s that time of year again; in a few hours, Slashdot will be pink, Uncyclopedia will be out of a job for 24 hours, and countless English Wikipedia users and administrators will be systematically introducing nonsense, destroying (even temporarily) the user interface and existing content, and the whole project will be a mess.

Now, anyone knows that I like my share of nonsense, but the kind of stuff I witnessed last year was going too far…this stupid little culture of “let’s trash the ‘pedia for a few hours” needs to stop.

April 1st is also the date we switched to using Subversion as our version control solution for MediaWiki, and I don’t think we’ve looked back. Having a decent, modern SCM to support a relatively tough challenge really makes things a lot easier, and Subversion is arguably easier to use in areas which really count, meaning that newer developers are branching, developing complex features, and having them merged in faster, which is great.

One thing I’d love to see in Subversion is something akin to “shelving“, which some solutions have – shelving is the ability to quickly save and revert your uncommitted changes in the current working copy until you opt to have them brought back. This is great for quickly abandoning a slightly more involved change in order to make a smaller one. While it’s possible to do emulate this in Subversion using multiple checkouts or a patch creation/revert/patch application model, it’s a bit more cumbersome than being able to select a “Shelve…” option, give a name, and then go back to that at leisure.

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