RC1 Progress

It's almost here. A ton of work has been done on the documentation front led largely by Stefan. I think I'm the actual blocker at the moment, as I need to document the Crafted OSX module. I'll get to that in the next few days. Once I complete that, we should be ready for a final internal review before cutting to a RC1 branch.

TODOs once RC1 is released

• We need to develop a transition guide to address the differences between Crafted Emacs V1 and V2. We'd like for this to be a smooth transition, but V2 is completely different in mindset from V1, so there will be a lot of work to transition from one to the other.
• I'll delete the deleted-modules directory
• Double check comments in code to make sure they are still accurate.
• Testing.

Crafted Emacs V2 release on the horizon

Once we get the RC1 branch put out the door, we'll be looking for as many as who are willing to put the screws to the configuration and file bug reports. Once those are resolved, we'll release V2. So the time between RC1 and a V2 release may be short or long depending on how many people are willing to test and file issues for us to look at and resolve. Once things are settled out for about a week or so, we'll do another internal review to make sure we have covered everything and then I'll push the next release and submit a blog post.

Updates

Fun fact (I'm sure you probably knew this), Emacs has a way to document changes in a ChangeLog file. So, I've given it a go for the past few weeks to keep track of changes since the my last post here. It's a bit of a duplication of work from one sense because the same information is in the *vc-change-log*, it just isn't formatted the same way. Not sure I'll keep up with it, but it has been an interesting exercise. So, here is what we have been up to recently:

• Documentation for these modules:
  • Crafted Defaults
  • Crafted Evil
  • Crafted IDE
  • Crafted Init
  • Crafted Speedbar
  • Crafted Startup
  • Crafted Updates
  • Crafted Workspaces
  • The Getting Started Guide
• Fixes for the Crafted Speedbar module
• Fixes for the Crafted OSX module
• Deleted the obsolete bootstrap directory.

In other news…

I've been using vc mode a lot more for my version control operations in Emacs. Magit provides quite the nice experience, but vc mode is also a lot nicer than what it seems a lot of people give it credit for. One of the nicest things about magit is the menu that pops up when need to do an operation. The status page is also well built and has some nice information on it. If I use vc-dir and then from there type L I get nearly the same information. At the top, I see my repository information, under that a list of things that changed or are unregistered, and in the bottom window, I see the *vc-change-log*. For me, there have been several cases where vc mode has been quicker to operate than magit. I haven't tried to track that down, but especially for local work, vc mode is extremely quick. Some operations take extra steps. For example in magit I can stage a new file and a changed file at the same time and commit that in one step. With vc, I have to register the new file, commit that, then possibly amend that commit to include the edited file because everything has to be in the same state and added is not the same as edited. In cases like that, I just use magit. Simpler to do. Otherwise, it's just as easy to use vc either directly from the buffer I'm editing or from vc-dir to mark multiple files and then commit them.

I've also tried working with forge in magit. For me, it's been a bit flaky. A couple of things to pay attention to: the repository name must match on both sides. So, for example, you must use git clone https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs and not git clone https://github.com/systemcrafters/crafted-emacs because the case doesn't match and forge won't find the repository. Once you get that all worked out, you can pull the issues and PRs, but you can't approve or request changes on a PR from the forge interface. You can post comments though. Still a good package though, and if you work with PRs but don't need those features, it might work out for you. There hasn't been a release in over a year, and the released version has a number of defects which show up with odd messages like “Switching to deleted buffer”. There are fixes available, so you may prefer to pull forge directly from source with package-vc (or something similar) or just use the version from MELPA. I'll probably contact the author and ask for an updated release and I'd rather have the released version than the development version.

Happy Crafting!!

Tags: #emacs