We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

The theme for my morning, on the first day of the conference, was version control. The conference day was divided into mini-confs covering different topic areas, but this was a common theme of the sessions I attended in different mini-confs.

After the introductory session (which included an amusing video about Wellington), I attended Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk “Version Control for Mere Mortals” which was an introduction to version control concepts and how to start using it.

The sun finally came out, so today has been warm and bright, a proper summer day. It’s too bad I’ll now be cooped up inside conference rooms for the rest of my stay here.

I stopped in briefly into another talk to learn something about Gearman, and then attended Martin Krafft’s talk on vcs-pkg.org, which is exploring the application of version control to the problem of package maintenance in Linux distributions. One of the hard problems in this space is that there are two alternative ways of modeling packages, both of which are in active use and have distinct advantages and disadvantages: a sequence of patches, and a graph (DAG) of revisions. Inter-operation between systems which use different models is not straightforward.

I had lunch at Mac’s Brewery on the waterfront and talked mainly about version control, Bazaar in particular.