bzr vs. hg -- a different perspective

I'd say one of my favorite parts of F/OSS is the educational value I can get from it. There's much more practical programming knowledge in Python/import.c than in your average CS textbook.

My code curiosity recently turned to my favorite (D)VCSes, Mercurial, and Bazaar. (I've tried reading Subversion, but the C is just too much.) Much of the world (including me) likes to battle over their merits, but I'd like to talk about what I saw in the source. (Disclaimer: I do not claim to have an good knowledge of either project's design philosophy or why things were done the way they were.)

On the superficial side, Bazaar has a lot more code than Mercurial does: About 1 MB with 2.5 MB of tests for Mercurial and 6MB with 6 MB of tests for Bazaar. I'm not going to make anything of it, though, for fear of condemnation. Mercurial's non-capitalized class names also drive me a bit crazy...

Overall, Mercurial appears to be a much simpler system, true to the wisdom of "do one thing well". The one repository format is beautifully simple. Bazaar, on the other hand, has to have layers of abstraction in order to make access over many protocols and different repository, branch, and working tree formats possible. For this complexity, it gains much flexibility allowing it to be a hybrid distributed and central VCS. Bazaar's source code also has many more comments and docstrings. Mercurial's looks rather bare in comparison.

Bazaar and Mercurial both seem to implement dirstate the same way. They also both have C extensions targeted to speed themselves up.

In the end, the both work well and are a pleasure to use, so I'm not going to complain.

The Second betas are out!

Our release manager, Barry Warsaw, has just released (I prefer unleashed) Python 2.6 and 3.0 beta 2 in the big, wild world. Highlights (that I can recall) include:

• Installing on Mac for 3.0 is fixed.


• test_multiprocessing hangs have been fixed.


• gettext has gotten a different API.


• Tracebacks now display their causes and contexts. See exception chaining.


• Antoine Pitrou got commit access. Yeah!

Even now, the planned final release date in October looms, so we need lots of people to test their application and libraries with the beta release and file bug reports.

Learning Django

Quite honestly, I haven't done any web programming since I quit PHP. I do hear a lot of about all those Python web frameworks, so when I saw a link to the Django Book, I took the initiative and started reading. I haven't tried out any other frameworks, but my initial reaction is to love Django. It's obviously well designed around DRY and the Zen and very well documented. Django models are beautiful and makes SQL very painless.

Having worked through the examples in the book, I've started conceiving a larger project. I'd like to make my personal homepage. Obviously, it would have a lot of static content, and I want to do that in the clearest way possible. So, I'll steal a hint from the django docs: write my site in reST and dynamically generate the webpage with docutils. (It will be a good exercise with caching.) In fact, I have a version running locally.

[My first lazyweb query:] Where can I get good Python hosting? I'll need to upload Django, too because I'm running off SVN. Can it be gotten cheap or even for free?

BTW, I'm now aggregated on Planet Python!