https://bwinton.github.io/weblog.latte.ca/enSat, 13 Apr 2019 21:03:25 GMTNikola (getnikola.com)http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttps://bwinton.github.io/weblog.latte.ca/blake/tech/thunderbird/vms/Blake Winton<div><p>A lot of the code I write for <a href="http://mozillamessaging.com/">Thunderbird</a> has to work on <a href="http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/all.html">all</a> the platforms it supports. Since I don’t own a <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/">Linux</a> or <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7">Windows</a> box, and don’t really want to waste the hard drive space on my <a href="http://www.apple.com/ca/macbookpro/specs.html">MacBook Pro</a> with a dual- or triple-boot setup, I’ve decided to install the other operating systems on virtual machines. (I’ve chosen <a href="http://www.virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</a>, because it’s free, and I’m cheap. As an added bonus, it works quite well, too.)</p> <p>If I was forced to use a centralized version control system, this would lead to a bunch of pain, since I wouldn’t want to check in a half-finished patch, but I would still really want to see what changes I made for one OS, to try and figure out what changes I need to make for the others. And I would want to be able to keep a record of what I did, step by step, so that I could undo stuff if it turned out to be a bad idea. (Hey, that sounds like a perfect task for a version control system! ;)</p> <p>Since Mozilla uses <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>, I didn’t have to deal with any of that. I had my repository on the host machine, which I had cloned from the main repo, and I just cloned it into each of the virtual machines. Whenever I started a VM, I pulled the latest set of changes from the host machine; As I fixed stuff on that platform, I committed to the repository on the virtual machine; And before I shut down the VM, I pushed my changes back to the host machine. When I wanted to see which changes I made to get things working for the platform, it was easy, and propagating those changes to the other virtual machines was also easy.</p> <p>When people talk about the advantages of distributed version control, a lot of the time they mention being able to still commit your changes when you’re on an airplane, and sharing in-progress changes with other people, but for people like me who do mainly self-contained stuff and don’t fly anywhere, supporting multi-platforms with virtual machines and still being able to track my changes might just be the killer feature.</p></div>hgprogrammingvirtual_machineshttps://bwinton.github.io/weblog.latte.ca/blake/tech/thunderbird/vms/Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:12:48 GMT