By Claire L. Evans / CC BY-ND 2.0

This is an updated version of Multiple Parallel Mono Environments.

What is Pulque?

Pulque is a collection of applications written in Ruby and Bash scripting to maintain parallel development environments.

Why does Pulque exist?

Three reasons:

1. I need to keep multiple versions installed of the same software,
2. I need to know what Version Control System is used by the software, and the most important
3. I want to keep myself sane.

At work, I have to interact with different open source projects, most of them use Subversion and Git, but some others use Bazaar and Mercurial. Keeping track of the current parallel development environment and the VCS used by the software is exhausting.

You spend time focusing on something that shouldn’t be that important:

• Managing your parallel environments and,
• Keeping track of the VCS used by the software

Is easy to get confused when interacting with the repository, for example, executing svn update when the software is stored in a git repository. Is silly, but it happens. Unless you are using an IDE that support Multiple Parallel Development Environments you will need the terminal to configure and build your projects.

Pulque helps you maintaining parallel development environments by:

• Printing in the bash prompt the name of the parallel development environment and the type of the VCS, this information is updated depending on the working directory,
• Defining aliases to the default commands used to configure and build the software project, to always prefix your projects using your parallel environment, and
• Showing a failure or success alert when the command finishes.

Installing and using Pulque

Follow the instructions in INSTALL, or if you are using openSUSE 11.2:

Click here to drink Pulque!

Don’t forget to add the function pswitch to your .bashrc. Bash will autocomplete your environment name when using TAB TAB.

function pswitch {
  source /usr/bin/__pswitch $1
}

Read the USING file to understand how to use Pulque in the daily basis. If you find something weird or interesting please create an issue to fix it.

Colophon

According to Wikipedia: “Pulque, or octli, is a milk-colored, somewhat viscous alcoholic beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant, and is a traditional native beverage of Mexico.“

A couple of days ago I finished reading: The Ruby Programming Language, book written by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto. If I have to say anything about the book and, the language, of course, is: I am impressed. The syntax is pretty for writing and simple for reading. Its simplicity makes you understand the code, is like visualizing the goal of the program in your mind by reading it, not running it. It is like reading a well written letter. You just understand.

I must say, when I was reading the book, at the beginning. I did not feel comfortable with the weird, at that time, syntax. Method decorations such as “!” and “?”, and the support for methods aliases made no sense. Actually I thought I was wasting my time by trying to learn the language. I was wrong.

When I learned C++ several years ago, I did not have reference to object orientation or any object-oriented programming language. Learning it was difficult, but, at the same time, easy. Difficult because I did not know the paradigm, easy because it was my first time learning that kind of syntax. After learning C++ I decided to learn Java and after that, I decided to learn C#.

And I learned them all the same way. I “translated” the syntax. Translated it from the “new language” to the “old language”. I did learn them all. And I thought, for long time, that the rule was: “Learn all the languages the same way: by translation”. I was wrong. Again.

Learning a new programming language, in my opinion, is better when you do not translate the new language. Similar to learn to speak a new language. In both cases, you have to think in the language. I decided to think in the new language. To do it that way. The Ruby way. The results were amazing. Were so amazing that inspired me to write a project in Ruby. I wanted to try out the syntax, the platform and the community. To see if the language was that good as I thought.

After trying it out. No disappointments at all. Actually is interesting that C# and Ruby share a lot of things, syntactically speaking. Both of them are pretty languages. Probably they do not share goals. However, I’m sure they share one goal: to make the life of the software developer easier. And, to a software developer, a programming language, and everything around it, that makes your life easier is what matters the most.