But when you find humor in even the most boring of the places, then even the most lethargic blogger like me gets inspired to write about it.
The time was 6:30 PM. I was almost at the end of a pretty busy day at work when my colleague from Stockholm pinged me over the Messenger.
It read, ‘Hey, Check out the CVS. I have something very interesting for you’.
For the uninitiated, the CVS – Concurrent Versioning System – is a software tool that keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers to collaborate. To the best of my knowledge, it could hardly contain anything that could interest me at the fag end of a rather tiring day. Nevertheless, I replied back.
‘Now what can be so interesting in the CVS?’
‘Have a look at the Check-In and Check-Out comments for the file X.’
A Check-Out issued on a file provides a user with the latest copy of the file from the CVS Server and allows him to make modifications to the file. Once the user is done with the modifications to the file, he/she then Checks-In the file back to the CVS server, thereby committing the changes to the server. Typically, users provide comments during the Check-Out and Check-In process describing the nature of the change that is done on the file.
Therefore, it was with mild curiosity that I checked the comments on the file X. The first ten-odd Check-Out comments seemed pretty normal: ‘To fix AT Defect No…’, ‘To fix UAT Defect No…’, ‘Removing Procedure…’ That is, till I came to the comment in question. It read:
‘make changes’
How illuminating, I thought. Now what can those changes be? Intrigued, I proceeded to check the corresponding Check-In comment. Despite the late hour, a smile brightened my face when I read the comment:
‘made changes’
Later on, I had a chat with the person who had provided those comments. I came to know from him that he was new to using the CVS tool, and because he was using for the first time, he was quite lost for comments, and wrote the first thing that came to his mind. We had a hearty laugh about the matter over a cup of coffee.
If a tool like CVS, which provides limited scope for users to enter comments can provide us with unexpected humor, then is it not fair to expect bigger things from the famous debug statements that we programmers include in our code? More about this in my next post.
Penned over a rather boring weekend (3rd and 4th of May, 2008)
@ BTM Layout, Bangalore
@ BTM Layout, Bangalore