Git for the lazy

I just wrote a guide for git, for people who don't know what a distributed version control system is, and don't care.

git for the lazy

That will take you from zero to hero... well, zero to something, fast.

On the side, I also gave Mercurial a shot, since I wanted to use it for some *shudder* Windows development. From what I saw, it lacked the two things I liked about git:

1. Local, non-cloned repo "proper" branches (in progress though), and
2. an index cache/staging area (I heard it has something similar, but I haven't found it anywhere).

So when it came down to git and Cygwin versus Mercurial and Window's cmd.exe, the choice was somewhat one-sided.

If I'm mistaken about either of those features, and anybody wants to fill me in, you're welcome to comment. :)


::EDIT::

However, I do like Mercurial's local revision numbers. It probably works better for it than git though, since Mercurial's branches are essentially repository clones.

Common Lisp + Emacs + SLIME under Windows

Due to reasons relating to my studies, I have to deal with Windows more often now. Crap. But I can still play around with Common Lisp.

Or so I thought at first. I already have Emacs installed, getting the CLISP Common Lisp implementation and SLIME should be easy, right?

How wrong I was.

Nothing seemed to go right. I mean, the downloads went A-OK, and I installed things alright. Tacking it all together ran me into brick walls. Repeatedly. There were always obscure errors about not being able to invoke the Lisp implementation properly. Google, universal as it is, still came up with lots of cruft.

Eventually, I found out from a post online (by Robert Zubek) that spaces in paths caused problems in SLIME. It never really comes up in *nix environments, because nobody's dumb enough to put spaces in any directory names, but SLIME groks paths using 'split-string. This of course means that directory names with spaces will be pulled apart where they aren't meant to.

Solution? Install everything in friggin' C:\. No spaces, no nothing. After the usual setting of paths for SLIME in .emacs, everything works just dandy.

Hacking on Windows: who'dve thunk it?