Whose rev is it anyway?

Recently a teammate reported an inconsistency between our code and documentation: the cloud altitude in our rain model is supposed to be in units of meters with a default of 3km, but the default in the code was 10.

We checked both snapshots we thought they had, but both were in order. The last time the default changed in the trunk was over a year ago, and that was a change in units (i.e., 3.0 to 3000.0). 'Maybe they changed the code,' I thought but then remembered that the finger-pointing game is an evil at whose very root we must strike!

Principle is great — in principle — but now I had to hunt through more than a hundred tags to clear dB's name. That's a lot of clicky-clicky in the HTTP view. Instead, I could pull copies of rain_model.c from all hundred-plus tags and grep those.

Ugh. There ought to be a quicker way.

Then I remembered importing our Subversion repository into a Git repository using git-svn. With git-grep, searching through all those revisions is straightforward:

$ git grep 'cloud_altitude *= *[^3 ]' \
  `git branch -a | grep tags` -- \
  libs/env/rain_model.c

Joy!

The [^3 ] bit in the search pattern means find a character that's neither a 3 nor a space, the latter being necessary to prevent spuriously matching a space to the left of the value being assigned — effectively asking for all assignments in all tags to cloud_altitude. Not what we want.

Unlike Subversion, Git's operations are almost all local. That means fast! The above search ran in less than a quarter of a second.

Turns out the weird default was our doing after all, from a nearly two-year-old engineering release. Here's to keeping egg off our faces!

SEC coaches spoof

Elvis + bacon =

Grrr!

My son's basketball team has a game tomorrow at Mount Carmel — tipoff at 3pm, same time as the national championship game. Our people asked the other team to reschedule, but they refused — probably a bunch of bitter Aubies.