newlispfanclub.alh.net

I took all the previous open source releases of newlisp and imported them into a git repository.

The repository is up to date, including version 10.1.4

To fetch the repository, run this command:
This will download the repository (currently 13 megs) and create a "newlisp" directory with the source code all checked out and ready to go.

If this should be hosted by newlisp.org instead, I'd be happy to help in any way requested.

Having this repository gives you complete history.

If you want to see when a particular line of a particular file was changed, you use the git-blame command:
For each line in the file, you get the commit id that last changed that line.

This also lets you quickly and easily compare differences between versions, and prepare patches to submit to Lutz. Lutz doesn't like receiving patches at the present time, but perhaps if he starts using a version control system like git, he will appreciate them. :-)

Did I mention git is a distributed version control system, easily letting Lutz merge in changes from other developers, should others take an interest and start developing features on side branches?

Thanks.

Even if one does not hack the source, Git VC may help in tracking other, more user-side changes, such as changes in documentation between the versions, to track newlisp operator options/modifications etc.

One thing that impressed me is that all 50 past versions crunched down to only 13 megs. Each tarball is about a meg and a half in size, gzipped and compressed.

So instead of 70 megs of storage for the entire revision history of the project, it only needed 13. That is a 5:1 reduction in space usage.

Oh, Git is great.
It's fast too. And sort of generic - one can think of many uses, it behaves as a kind of "filesystem" you can control with command-line utilities.
At one time I experimented with using Git as my back-end versioned storage for a p2p blogs system. I still believe it can be used like that and feed a moderately-active web site (tens of requests per second, at least).

Actually, I've seen a couple of other people coding web apps with Git as a backend, in place of a database or a filesystem storage.

Interesting! I didn't know about git!
During my googling, I found this site: http://github.com/, maybe it could be useful for this!