tools on Oxymoronical

Making a case sensitive directory on Windows and macOS

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:53:00 +0100

Now that Firefox has switched to git as its canonical source code repository a number of us have been longing for all the nice features that Mercurial used to provide that are much more awkward with git. So many of us have been experimenting with Jujutsu which provides a lot of what is missing. It’s pretty good, I recommend giving it a go if you are also forced to use git!

But it has an annoying bug. If you’re on a case insensitive filesystem (the default on macOS and Windows) and a change renames a file in a way that only changes the case of the filename then Jujutsu gets confused. I think what’s going on is when it tries to apply the change it tells the OS to rename the file and then the OS sees that the filename is the “same” and does nothing. Subsequently Jujutsu constantly thinks there is a change because the filename on disk doesn’t exactly match what it expects and everything gets messy. The workaround is to manually rename those files to the correct names but that is annoying. I don’t know if Mozilla are particularly bad at this but the two examples in the issue are us and another just landed recently 😂.

Searchfox in VS Code

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 12:21:13 +0000

I spend most of my time developing flipping back and forth between VS Code and Searchfox. VS Code is a great editor but it has nowhere near the speed needed to do searches over the entire tree, at least on my machine. Searchfox on the other hand is pretty fast. But there’s something missing. I usually want to search Searchfox for something I found in the code. Then I want to get the file I found in Searchfox open in my editor.

hgchanges is down, probably for good

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 14:01:35 +0000

My little tool to help folks track when changes are made to files or directories in Mozilla’s mercurial repositories has gone down again. This time an influx of some 8000 changesets from the servo project are causing the script that does the updating to fail so I’ve turned off updating. I no longer have any time to work on this tool so I’ve also taken it offline and don’t really have any intention to bring it back up again. Sorry to the few people that this inconveniences. Please go lobby the engineering productivity folks if you still need a tool like this.

Globes

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 19:14:21 +0000

I got bored over the weekend and decided to try my hand at fractal art again. I used to play around with this years ago but not so much recently. I was pretty disappointed to find that nothing has really changed when it comes to the tools available for creating fractals. Most of them haven’t been updated in years and there don’t seem to be much in the way of new kids on the block that I can see either. About the only new tool I found is Chaotica which hasn’t been updated in a year and only slowly before then. I used it to create the above piece.

hgchanges is back up

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 10:33:05 +0000

The offending changeset that broke hgchanges yesterday turns out to be a merge from an ancient branch to current tip. That makes the diff insanely huge which is why things like hgweb were tripping over it. Kwierso point out that just ignoring those changesets would solve the problem. It’s not ideal but since in this case they aren’t useful changesets I’ve gone ahead and done that and so hgchanges is now updating again.

hgchanges is down for now

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 21:23:31 +0000

My handy tool for tracking changes to directories in the mozilla mercurial repositories is going to be broken for a little while. Unfortunately a particular changeset seems to be breaking things in ways I don’t have the time to fix right now. Specifically trying to download the raw patch for the changeset is causing hgweb to timeout. Short of finding time to debug and fix the problem my only solution is to wait until that patch is old enough that it no longer attempts to index it. That could take a week or so.

An update for hgchanges

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:47:18 +0000

Nearly a year ago I showed off the first version of my webapp for displaying recent changes in mercurial repositories. I’ve heard directly from a number of people that use it but it’s had a few problems that I’ve spent some of my spare time trying to solve. I’m now pleased to say that a new version is up and running. I’m not sure it’s accurate to call this a rewrite since it was entirely incremental but when I look back over of the code changes there really isn’t much that wasn’t touched in some way or other. So what’s new? For you, a person using the site absolutely nothing! So what on earth have I been doing rewriting the code?

Get notifications about changes to any directory in mercurial

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:36:32 +0000

Back in the old days when we used CVS of all things for our version control we had a wonderful tool called bonsai to help query the repository for changes. You could list changes on a per directory basis if you needed which was great for keeping an eye on certain chunks of code. I recall there being a way of getting an RSS feed from it and I used it when I was the module owner of the extension manager to see what changes were landed that I hadn’t noticed in bugs.

I must be missing something in the clouds

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:38:18 +0000

For a long time now there have been web applications mirroring pretty much all the applications I use locally, email, calendar, spreadsheets, etc. I keep looking at these and feeling like I should jump on the bandwagon, after all lots of the people I work with use them and rave about them so they must be great right? The problem is I can’t figure out what I am actually missing, and most of the time I can spot immediately things I would miss by moving to them.

Keeping Track

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:58:42 +0000

In the past year or so that I’ve been working for Mozilla I’ve found myself slowly working my way through a bunch of different ways to keep track of all of the work on my plate. I still don’t think I’ve found the best way so I wondered what other people do to manage such things?

For a rough idea of my work, most of my work is bug oriented. Either bugs that I want to work on when I get some time, bugs I am actively working on, bugs I am waiting for review on, bugs I am reviewing, bugs I am waiting to check in, bugs I want to backport to a branch… and so on. Then there is other work like planning future work and working with extension authors to help resolve their problems.