Tag: git

git svn info: Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

If you ever had to work with a clone of a git repo which was created with git-svn, you might have tried to run

git svn info .

to find out about the latest svn revision in the git tree. Instead, you will see the error message

Unable to determine upstream SVN information from working tree history

and you might scratch your head. Turns out that git svn info only works for local trees created with git-svn. Once you clone such a tree, all svn related metadata will be lost. This data loss is by design. Apparently git considers svn info to be “metadata” which will not be cloned, whereas git history is not “metadata” and will thus be cloned. Is is also apparently fairly well known among git developers and advanced users that git svn only works from the repository it is initialized from, but the documentation doesn’t mention this limitation anywhere AFAICS. Similar issues exist for git svn log.

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Qi Hardware: Freedom Redefined – New Open Hardware company to ship Ben NanoNote device in fall 2009

Qi Hardware Ben NanoNote

I recently stumbled over a neat new Open Hardware and Free Software friendly company — Qi Hardware — founded by former OpenMoko developers.

To quote from the website:

Qi Hardware, founded on the belief in open hardware, produces mass market quality hardware applying free software principles to consumer electronics. The three fundamental elements in our development are copyleft hardware, upstream kernels and community driven software.

They have put up a timeline for upcoming products, where the 本 NanoNote™ (Ben NanoNote™) — a fully open multifunction ultra small form factor computing device — is the first entry product that is supposed to ship in fall 2009.

The Ben NanoNote is based on an Ingenic SoC (336 MHz XBurst Jz4720 MIPS-compatible CPU) with 3.0” color TFT (320x240), 2GB NAND flash, 32 MB SDRAM, SDHC microSD, micro-USB 2.0. The whole device, including the 850mAh Li-ion battery, weighs only 126g. Detailed specs are available.

Their currently planned setup includes a Linux kernel, u-boot, and OpenWRT as software basis. Personally, I'd like to see a stock Debian running on the hardware sooner or later, of course. The 2GB of flash and 32MB of RAM should be fine for a small Debian system (for instance, my NSLU2 runs off a 1GB thumb drive and has 32MB RAM, and is still very useful).

The code is all GPL'd and available from various git repos, hardware will be CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed, and they try to use Free Software design and development tools also, including KiCAD for schematics and PCB layout, and probably HeeksCAD as CAD tool for mechanical stuff.

gEDA/PCB logo
I'm really tired of seeing more and more self-proclaimed "Open Hardware" projects that often don't even mention any license for their schematics and PCBs, or use crappy, self-invented "open" licenses that are not even remotely open in any way. Probably even worse, many hardware related projects use closed-source, proprietary electronic design tools such as EAGLE or OrCAD, thereby ruining the whole project from the beginning by forcing everyone who likes to contribute or adapt the hardware to use non-free software. That's why I was really happy to see the Qi people thrive to use open tools from the beginning! I hope to see more hardware projects use KiCAD or gEDA/PCB for their designs in future...