Bits of Learning

Learning sometimes happens in big jumps, but mostly in little tiny steps. I share my baby steps of learning here, mostly on topics around programming, programming languages, software engineering, and computing in general. But occasionally, even on other disciplines of engineering or even science. I mostly learn through examples and doing. And this place is a logbook of my experiences in learning something. You may find several things interesting here: little cute snippets of (hopefully useful) code, a bit of backing theory, and a lot of gyan on how learning can be so much fun.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Working with CVS

I am facing the versioning issues in proper sense for the first time. Or may be for the first time I trying to solve these problems in that fashion.

The testing directory in my CVS repository contains two tags: after-philips(branch) and with-arguments(main trunk). The after-philips tag is what I had at the end of the Philips Research internship of the last year. with-arguments contains the work that contains the addition that I did afterwards, mainly, the capability of cg to generate code from API specs. with functions taking arguments.

Now, the problem starts. In my funcoding directory, I have a testing directory. This contains the development I was doing in order to incorporate the pointers feature to the API language. This code was checked out from the with-arguments revision tag. Basically the objective of this development is to handle functions accepting pointer arguments. Multiple values are returned through these arguments, and they figure in the preconditions and postconditions of the API functions. That work ran into sticky implementation issues. I digressed from that to do this paper-writing work.

Now, I am supposed to create some results which will hopefully be incorporated in the paper. So, I can checkout yet another copy from with-arguments revision tag. However, I am anticipating that this will contain a series of checkins which I don't want to interfere with my with-pointer(no such tag actually exists in the repository. Here I am refering to it just for explanation sake) branch.

Solution: I created a branch icsm06-demo. And checked out a local copy from this branch. So my tinkering with this branch will keep my with-pointers work unaffected.

Currently, I am not able to foresee if some of this work will need to be merged with the with-pointers branch. We will see later!

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