Ying Tong Iddle I Po

My life was saved yesterday.

Less dramatically, a piece of software made my life better whereas, without it, life would have been worse.

Let’s give a bit of context first though: I’ve a very basic form of regression testing for Firtree (reflecting its somewhat volatile nature) which consists of a number of ‘example’ python scripts which exercise Firtree’s features. Each script also prints out the allocated object count at program exit which, if non-zero, indicates something has fecked up in my reference counting, either inside Firtree itself or in the Python bindings.

Usually, being a good little software engineer, after writing a feature, but before committing, I run these scripts confirming they still look right and this reference count is zero. Yesterday I went a bit mad and added a ton of features and an associated ton of commits. As is virtually guaranteed when you behave so recklessly, when I did run the scripts everything looked screwed up and memory leaked like a sieve. This prompted one of the worst things you could hear when, for example, you are sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car: a single, sharp, under the breath uttering of the word ’sh*t’.

Fortunately I had used Firtree as a test-bed for developing with Bazaar, a decision I am now very glad of. Suddenly I had the coding equivalent of a TARDIS and an infinite number of universes to play with. I branched off from the last ‘good’ version of Firtree and gently rolled forward in time until the naughty patch was revealed. Then, in true time-traveller style, I made a change in the past but then let the future merge in. Painless in the extreme with bazaar. Finally we reached the ‘alternate 1985′ where, far from being the apocalyptic vision I had created, all was well and no memory leaked (that I could detect).

I am far from groking Bazaar in any meaningful way (as anyone who cares to notice the fsck-ups in the Firtree tree will attest) but already I have experienced a complex branch and step-by-step merge which would have been incredibly painful with other tools.

Oh, by the way, feel free to s/Bazaar/$MY_VCS/. This is more a post of how rocking modern VCSs are, not how Bazaar is necessarily the best.

Update: An example of the process is available on my website. I’m not recommending this as the ‘Right Way’ but it worked for me.

Back in t’day, between using the original Netscape Messenger and GMail, I used two mail clients. They were pine and mutt. Pine was what I read my University mail in and mutt took care of my personal mail.

Spin forward a few years to the Great Unification of my email system which happened when I left University (for the first time). I moved everything over to a large, brittle, system consisting of equal parts exim magic, procmail sourcery and fetchmail pain. This towering edifice of hacks had, at its treacherous pinnacle, mutt and a huge custom .muttrc.

Then along came GMail and all was well. Well, nearly. GMail was missing some of the nice features that I had come to rely on. These included:

• Mutt would let me edit mail in VIM. GMail wanted me to do serious editing within a TEXTAREA widget. After some pain, I managed to deal with writing slightly less pretty mails.
• Mutt has a lovely ‘reply to list’ feature. This feature helps me deal with some of the vagarities of various mailing lists I’m on. In particular it allows one to choose to ‘reply to sender’, ‘reply to list’ or ‘reply to all’. GMail lacks this middle option.
• Mutt has the concept of ‘hooks’. The simplest use of which was to use a different signature automatically if I was either replying from a particular address or the original email had come to me via a rôle list rather than a personal mail. GMail lets you set up multiple sending addresses but doesn’t let you specify rules for signatures or for choosing these.
• Mutt is prettier. OK, this is entirely subjective but I find Mutt’s clean interface far preferable to web-based email. I’m a bit of a conservative and somehow get reassured by curses-based UIs.

On the other hand, GMail was run by people with email CLU and my email system was run by someone lacking a great deal of this CLU, i.e. me. In time I came to either work around these problems or find Firefox extensions/hacks which fixed some issues. Said workarounds were non-ideal, however, and the extensions would often stop working as GMail was upgraded.

Then GMail allowed IMAP access. Recently, at home, I was testing evolution, mainly to try out the Google Calandar integration. I set up IMAP access to GMail while I was there and suddenly realised the obvious: I could have the best of both worlds, using mutt to read/send/compose mail and using GMail’s far better maintained email servers.

So today I dusted off my old .muttrc, deleted the lines relating to my old setup, added some simple stuff to let mutt use GMail’s IMAP service and fired it up. I’m trialling mutt as my primary client for the next week and we’ll see if I regain my former email joy.

As a corollary to the above, email from me might be a bit… erratic… this week as I retune myself to the One True Way. :)