Quick tip: how to make CVS status actually usable

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Sun, 2010-03-21 16:42

Like any VCS, CVS is able to show the status of the current directory when compared with the repository from which it is checked out.

However, unlike SVN, GIT, or bzr, which by default show only a rather compact set of information, CVS provides already verbose information, with only an option to add even more, and no terse mode.

Luckily, piping its output through a few commands allows one to obtain such a compact cvs status display. I tend to use this, aliased to cvsst.

alias cvsst="cvs st | grep -vE 'revision|Sticky|^$|==|Commit' | sed -r 's/^File: |Status: //g'"

Drupal as one of the key Internet Technologies

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Tue, 2010-02-23 15:31

Received this Harris Interactive poll today, on behalf of Tarsus, the french company organizing the Solutions Linux expo.

One of the choices was a list of the top 30 Internet Technologies. And guess what ? For once, Drupal was on the list: first time I see it mentioned in this type of business context. Interesting.

Drupal among the top 30 internet technologies

Debug vanilla

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Fri, 2009-12-11 12:14

Most of the time, when working on some piece of code, I'll resort to the configured debugger in my current Zend Studio configuration. And you probably do too :-)

However, I often have to access debug-type information on live sites where installing a debugger is out of the question, and I find myself often resorting to parameter dumps like the following:
<?php
// lazy version for simple cases
function foo_bar($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(func_get_args());
// [...]

// less lazy version for more hairy cases
function foo_baz($x, $y, $z) {
dsm(array('in foo_baz, x' => $x, 'y' => $y, 'z' => $z));
// ...
?>

You've probably being using it too and, of course, after the first few dozen times, it becomes a bit used. So here's a tiny snippet that makes such dumps simpler to type and use :

Easy mass deletions

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Mon, 2009-11-16 14:21

Sometimes, you want to delete a whole bunch of users, terms, or nodes, say to cleanup a site while developing and still keep its configuration, so reinstalling is not really an option, and the normal content- or user-administration pages get in your way because they only show a limited number of entries, meaning you have to delete page after page of entries.

Subscribe to