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I vote for git.

Speed-wise, the browser I use most of the time beats everything trolls like him can throw its way.

And trying to claim that Opera beats FireFox feature-wise is just a pathethic piece of FUD. First, FireFox intentionally gives you the choice to use a lean bare-bones trunk, and add any features of your choice to it. Even if you count just the officially approved ones, you can choose from 1365 extensions. Without AdBlock, Opera is useless on the IntarWeb of today, where nearly every page consists mostly of ads.

Speaking of ads, let me throw in a blatant pitch for my Debian package to eliminate 18-33% of http requests at DNS lookup phase so your network will get at least a bit less clogged by users of lesser browsers: dnscruft.

Agreed. Very useful to ssh home and check my mail securely. Same with elinks

Will the issue of using RCSes in the kernel tree ever die down?

It more or less has since they've replaced bitkeeper with git.

Does it really matter?

Well, it probably doesn't matter to you if you arent part of the tree-maintenance heirarchy, since individual developers don't need to use git directly to submit their patches, but the maintainers use them to keep track of who submitted what patches when, when they were merged, if they were tweaked etc. Many maintainers were uncomfortable with BitKeeper because it was a proprietary platform meaning that they could go out of buiness, revoke linus's liscence, or any number of other things could go wrong. That's exactly what happened and so git was created to replace it.

using some kind of RCS/SCM solution is absolutely critical in a project as large as the linux kernel, if for no reason other than to have a history of where stuff came from. If they'd been using something from the get-go it would be a lot harder for SCO to make the claims that they have.

> Will the issue of using RCSes in the kernel tree ever die down?

Um, yes. It did so three months ago. It's called git.

Gah, if recommending a text based browser, please at least recommend a decent one! Lynx has aged rather poorly IMO, and is massively surpassed by elinks and especially w3m. In fact, w3m is good enough that sometimes I can't be bothered starting up X on my (very) aged laptop - though the lack of Unicode support in the Linux virtual console layer is annoying.

I use elinks http://elinks.or.cz/ although it's been so long since I evaluated them that I can't remember why I liked it better.

I lost track of the SCM status for the kernel, but my crude understanding is that the kernel developers rolled their own, git. Is git a fully-featured SCM? And if not, could using git be causing any additional workload that would be alleviated by using darcs or whatever?

And just for the record, what's the strategic plan for kernel SCM?

AJAX is a technique for updating a page with new information without a reload. The result is an updated page. Why would a visually impaired person be able to read a normal page but not an updated page? You do know there are javascript-enabled text-only browsers, do you?

'security smarts' are irrelevant. Javascript can make your site more attractive. A more attractive site attracts more visitors. A javascript site loses some visitors. When you gain more visitors by using javascript than you lose visitors, you use javascript. Simple economics.

My officemate literally just purchased Game Development with Lua. It is a neat book.

However, Lua is used for other things, includinge the ion window manager, the SciTE editor, the Elinks text webbrowser and more.

Except that searching the entire mail system for duplicate msgids to hard link to every time a message is received is not exactly a scalable solution!

You can do this efficiently by naming objects by their content hash, as in git.

(1) elinks

(2) lynx

There's elinks, a full-featured text mode browser. Supports frames, tables, some javascript, etc. It even has tabbed browsing!

Elinks [the mighty text browser] provided this feature long long back, using Lua scripting to rewrite the pages on the fly
see here on howto do it in elinks.

A better frontend is already coded. See git-pasky.

It is early days, of course, but this git should be easy enough to use for anyone who's been using cvs, subversion or the others. You do "git commit", "git commit", "git log", etc. And it's fast. On my poor laptop, "git diff" takes 0.1 second over the entire 235M kernel source.

This is the frontend to Linus' git stuff, and may be renamed Cogito to prevent confusion.

I looked at http://pasky.or.cz/~pasky/dev/git/ and I didn't seem to read any license or specifics about the code. Anybody have more information?

No, not really. What Linus is doing looks completely different. It is quite similar to Monotone if anything, in fact. It has quite a good description of itself in the README (skip the top part there :-) ).

One consequence of what he is doing is that it is trivial to do e.g. pulling from remote repositories (basically just two rsync commands), or diffing arbitrary two trees. You can see my scripts as an example.

No, not really. What Linus is doing looks completely different. It is quite similar to Monotone if anything, in fact. It has quite a good description of itself in the README (skip the top part there :-) ).

One consequence of what he is doing is that it is trivial to do e.g. pulling from remote repositories (basically just two rsync commands), or diffing arbitrary two trees. You can see my scripts as an example.

You are incorrect w.r.t. Linus quote, that's what Chris Wedgwood said. Linus is still considering Monotone, believing that the speed issues can be fixed.

Judging from the level of enthusiasm, the second top contender is probably Bazaar-NG, if it really delivers in time. SVN and derivatives aren't really so popular amongst kernel developers, for various reasons, so I wouldn't say it is that much likely that they/we will use that.

Note that we are now working on Git (you might like my branch now, which provides some humanly usable user interface ;-) ), Linus' interim storage system suitable for tracking of trees history. It is not a full-blown versioning control system, but it is lightning fast and probably can do enough stuff to be usable for the development at least until some full-blown VCS matures.

Motherfucker, this is how we roll!

Actually elinks is a further expansion on the concep that will handle some frames, tables and some javascript.

Opps, I replied too early. Compare this in your favorite graphical browser to the text-only browser eLinks' rendition of Google News. Then take a look at Google news using Lynx. See the difference? I thought so.

eLinks is a far better text based browser compared to Lynx. eLinks actually tries to recreate a better layout of the web page, tables, forms, etc, while Lynx is basically just the same as telnetting into the web server port with all of the HTML tags ripped away. eLinks also supports SSL, colored text, and mouse input, so that you can actually use it to browse the web and even do a little shopping on Ebay or Amazon.

In fact, I don't think that anybody in their right mind actually still uses Lynx. Once Links hit the net, nobody ever looked back. Eventually Links gave way to improved version such as eLinks. I guess many people used Lynx many years ago, and then never used a text based browser again, so they don't know any better?

eLinks is lightweight, small, but a joy to use whether you are using a commandline only system or a graphical system. Give it a try, and you can bet that you will find it useful.

Surely, you mean elinks!!! ;-)

I think you mean elinks. It has every thing Lynx and Links has plus a lot more. including Frames, tabs, basic javascript, some CSS support, etc. They are even in the process of adding bittorent support right into the browser. Best text-only browser going!

ad mailing interface, you can if you really want. I.e. the ELinks Bugzilla has an email interface which works fine. It was only as a contrib/ patch in 2.16.3, dunno about 2.18.

ad 1), that's just a configuration issue. By default, Bugzilla lets anyone registered do basically anything.

ad 2), if you mean it to allow "offline bugfixing" (while sitting in an airplane), I think it just wouldn't fly. There is much greater potential for conflicts (which are more annoying to resolve) and it isn't really that difficult to just do it manually.

Link karma whoring to the rescue:
elinks homepage

Thus, IE 6 is not a "modern" browser.

In the same way The Strokes are not The Modern Lovers.

Does my lynx browser need updating?

It supports tables! :-)

ELinks has complete support for frames (viewing all at once).
Get it at ELinks website.

If you like w3m, you'll *love* elinks.

Oh, and the best damn console app ever is screen. It's a window manager for the console, and it simply rules...

1. Dev Todo is a wonderful outliner and task manager. Today I ported it to win32 using mingw to use at work (it pisses me off that windows dropped ANSI color support in their crappy CMD! I knew it was bad, but I still use it more than msys or cygwin because it is quicker on my slow box). Dev Todo stores everything in beautiful XML. I intend to make a filter for XSLT for my biweekly progress reports. My boss wants me to list things I've gotten done & what I plan to do & this great app can store all of that.
2. Pine-I don't care if RMS doesn't consider it free. It is the best IMAP client. I do like Mulberry as well, though.
3. GNU Screen-I mostly just detach/reattach. I'd like to learn to use it more.
4. VIM-My editor. Again, need to learn it better.
5. Lynx on windows and ELinks on Linux for browsing.
6. I have aliased "fuck" to use cowsay to tell me to calm down. Great stress relief.
7. GPG
8. LaTeX. I hesitated to include this, but I use it on both linux and windows & it is technically interactive. I have started using it more than standard word processors (WordPerfect>OpenOffice>MS Word) and I want to use it instead of impress/powerpoint/whatever.
9. OpenSSH because my box is so much better than the one I use at work
10. NcFTP best ftp client I found, though I have been having much less need to use it.

eLinks for a fancy text Web browser (better than Lynx and Links in my opinion) and tin for text newsreader.

These are not just for "old" machines, but also for remote work, and just the apps you use regularly when working primarily with a CLI -- especially an editor.*

'nuff said.

*) Be it emacs or vim. Both also come with GUI's.

Vim to edit text

Mutt for email

elinks to browse the web

MPlayer to play any media file (even videos in text mode)

mICQ for ICQ (also centericq for a multi-protocol IM client)

BitchX for IRC

lftp for ftp

I prefer eLinks over LYNX.

I prefer ELinks over Links and Lynx.

Elinks has become my primary browser as of late, nd w3m is kind of nice when I want to read comics. I'm on 400MHz with no video card to speak of at home (Debian GNU/Linux). I still use Galeon some, but even that's too slow for me, and Dillo just didn't support enough stuff (does it even know cookies?) There are some annoyances still, but overall, it's the best thing I've found for slow systems. Heck, I'm on a >1GHz computer at school at the moment and finding Firebird and IE both too slow for my tastes. I've been spoiled by test-based browsers.

First, go get antiword and elinks
To read HTML under mutt put something like
text/html; elinks -dump-charset 8859-1 -dump %s; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
inside your .mailcap file and put
auto_view text/html
inside your .muttrc file.

To read word attachments from inside mutt put
application/msword; antiword -m 8859-1.txt '%s'; copiousoutput; description=3D"Microsoft Word Text"; nametemplate=3D%s.doc
and
auto_view application/msword

respectively.
Note that you can even change the default charset in the commands and it works perfectly!!!

Uh, why should I? I personally work in textmode not out of masochism, but because I can work more effectively there. Therefore I tend to use a web browser which isn't PITA to look at and actually use, like lynx - hey, you cannot do things while the document is loading! Awful. Well, I'm using ELinks most of the time ;-).

At least use a real text mode browser, like eLinks. Lynx is a dinosaur. I can't think of any valid reason to use it anymore.

I like saying sextuple-U for the shock value of saying SEX .

Also, ten years from now, we'll all have flying cars in our browsers.

But really, we'll just have really annoying video playing all over and the same stupid flash/java games but in 3D. There hasn't really been much innovation since I started using netscape 1.0 that hasn't been really obnoxious (flash, animated gifs(?) [I don't remember if ns1 had these but ie3 did not], audio of different kinds, pop-up windows and other javascript lameness). Although I did find frames more acceptable than most people.

Maybe I'm only remembering the bad stuff, if someone can think of neat things that webpages have now please reply. I just find that most of the sites I visit are about as effective in elinks unless I want to see a picture.

I was just thinking of this a couple days ago and now this article pops up on slashdot. I think it would be incredibly efficient to be able to click a mouse button or select an option on a pop-up menu that would display a tree with the last branch at the position of your cursor. I often find myself clicking back to a site so I could find one that branched off it (especially if I took a wrong turn). I use tabs but find it's a sloppy remedy since I have to register wether or not this site is worth opening in a new window.

I even thought about making a modification to ELinks (awesome text browser BTW) but then figured I was too lazy to see it through to completion.

Also, speaking of input systems, I'm addicted to mouse gestures. Sometimes I'll be in some file manager and I'll right click + drag right to go back before realizing that it doesn't work there. This kind of interface confusion is most befuddling in windows because middle clicking in IE brings up a handy scroll tool that lets you scroll really fast while middle clicking in the file explorer does not. I thought they were supposed to be the same program!

Anyways, I'm on a tangent of a tangent so I'll click submit.

It would be maybe nice to have possibility in browsers to set whether referer should be actually sent and what should be sent inside. In fact, I know only about ELinks and Links now having this - you're free to set referer to "fake referer" (some string you're going to write down there is going to be sent), "normal referer" or referer containing URL of the page being loaded ("self-pointing referer" ;-). The "self-pointing referer" is set as default, and it helps workarounding most of the "protection" mechanisms, while effectively disclosing no possibly private information. Would be nice to see this in other browsers as well..