Meeting: Tuesday 27th July

[Tom Hukins]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 10:23:04PM +0100, Andy Selby wrote:
> The monthly MKLUG/MiltonKeynes.pm meet-up is nearly upon us!

I enjoyed last night's conversation and I thought I would summarise a
couple of conversations that stick in my mind:

Rod and I discussed the various version control systems that our
workplaces use and want to migrate to.  We're both looking forward to
moving to distributed version control systems from Subversion, which
we both considered "CVS done better" as opposed to "version control
done properly" as many others have observed before.

We both felt the name "distributed version control" misses the best
feature that such products have:  they serve as "self contained
version control systems" so everything from the repository lives in
your working copy.  Consequently, they let you play around more with
your code before pushing it to a server.

JJ told me about cpanminus, which I'd heard a bit about before as a
replacement for Perl's venerable CPAN client.  I'm going to try it out
today as JJ tells me it runs faster:  instead of parsing CPAN's list
of distributions it contacts a server over the network to figure out
what to install.

It's just occurred to me that I've described one tool that uses the
network to offload local processing and one that uses local resources
to provide more flexibility.  I guess there's still more than one way
to do it.

Tom