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If you have SSH on a server you can set up a proxy using SSH: ssh -D 8080 user@server -p 443 You can configure your browser to go to your local port 8080 using SOCKS. The remote server can be something at home, or on AWS, or on Cloudflare, etc. More info. Don't trust any proxy, build your own.

The DNS resolver is NOT part of the IP stack. It's an application level protocol that is usually done over UDP(sometimes TCP as well). The IP stack itself doesn't care about a DNS name, all it wants to get is an IP address provided from userspace.

Mind you most operating systems do come with a built in resolver of some sort, but often these have serious limitations.

For example, on most Unix type systems, the gethostbyname interface does not lend itself well to event loop style programming because it blocks. The typical solution has been to use an alternate DNS library like c-ares or adns. You can even use those libraries on Windows if you like and bypass it's DNS resolver as well.

There are many pieces of software out there that explicitly ignore anything to do with /etc/hosts and only fetch the nameservers from resolv.conf or similar. That's the problem with hosts files any piece of software is perfectly free to ignore it entirely!

I figured you of all people would know this.

My guess is that it's because a Google for him leads to https://daniel.haxx.se/

In the minds (or what passes for it) of US immigration and border control, that domain name means he must be a dangerous haxxor...

You said nothing useful about your project

C++ could be a good choice for all the things you've mentioned. Networking is not an issue, as there are many open source libraries (e.g. libcurl - http://curl.haxx.se/), and using Boost is often a good thing anyway. Also, there are at least two good memory allocators: tmalloc (http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html) and jemalloc (http://www.canonware.com/jemalloc/) so you may not need to write your own. (I assume that the above open source licenses are good for you, but they are just examples...)

However... I doubt that your project will be only Network + Memory + Disk. What else do you need? Some UI? Should it interact with the Web? Or with services in the Cloud? There's no easy answer to your question without knowing what else you need, and I wouldn't even exclude a hybrid-language approach (e.g. C++ / Python / JavaScript*).

* Before someone starts ranting about JavaScript having to run in a browser: NO - JavaScript runs perfectly fine withouth a browser, and can easily interact with C++. Have a look at V8 or SpiderMonkey, just to name some JavaScript engines.

What I have experienced is that SPDY (and therefor also HTTP/2) will only offer more speed if you are Google or are like Google.

This is so worn out it's even in the FAQ.

Multiplexing doesn't offer that much speed increase as some people would like you to believe.

It's good for every high-latency connection, like all the small sites have. I run a server on a VM on a generic Xeon box behind a DSL line, four hops from a backbone, for security and privacy reasons. It'll be great for my use case - I can't really compete with the big guys for responsiveness the way it is now.

Often, the content of a website is located on multiple systems (pictures, advertisements, etc), which still requires that the browser uses more than one connection, even with HTTP/2.

So, every one of those requests will be faster.

Also, HTTP/1 already allows a browser to send multiple requests without waiting for the response of the previous request. This is called request pipelining

Pipelining and multiplexing are different.

So, to me HTTP/2 adds a lot of complexity with almost no benefits in return.

So, don't add HTTP/2 support to your server - if nobody leaves then nobody wanted it. HTTP/1.1 will be supported for the next two decades.

Then why do we have HTTP/2? Well, because it's good for Google. They have all the content for their websites on their own servers.

Install Status4Evar - you'll see Google sites constantly jumping across all their domains, stalling on many of them.

Because IETF failed to come up with a HTTP/2 proposal, a commercial company (Google in this case) used that to take control. HTTP/2 is in fact a protocol by Google, for Google.

That just happens to help everybody else. Your critique of IETF's failure of leadership is quite valid, though. People have been hacking around HTTP/1.1's problems for the past 17 years and if Google hadn't done SPDY, we'd still be in that situation.

In my experience, you are far better off with smart caching. With that, you will be able to get far better speed-increase results than HTTP/2 will ever offer.

Agreed wholeheartedly! Nobody is arguing for not optimizing each layer of the stack. Proper caching can yield whole-number multipliers for responsiveness, not just mere percentages like HTTP/2!

In the last 20 years, a lot has changed. HTTP/1 worked fine for those years.

Read up on so many of the tricks browsers and servers (especially CDN ops) do to make HTTP/1.1 usable. These hacks are what inspired some of the SPDY changes, by people knee-deep in those hacks.

But for where the internet is headed, we need something new. Something completely new and not a HTTP/1 patch.

That would be great too. Do you have a proposal? Incremental approaches are usually easier to find acceptance for because they're more clearly understood and carry less risk of unexpected consequences.

I'm really going to miss being able to telnet to a server and troubleshoot using plain text. Feels like a lot of simple has disappeared from the internet

Yes, HTTP/2 is a multipllexing binary framing layer, but it has all the same semantics of HTTP/1.x on top.

HTTP/2 is 'just' an optimization. So if your webserver supports HTTP/1.x and HTTP/2 then you can still use telnet to check whatever you want and it should give the same result as HTTP/2.

But you also have to remember:
The IETF which is the group of people who design the Internet protocol made this statement:
https://www.iab.org/2014/11/14...

"Newly designed protocols should prefer encryption to cleartext operation."

The W3C made a similar statement, there are also drafts with the intention to moving to HTTPS by default.

So it is all moving to TLS protocols like HTTPS or STARTTLS for SMTP anyway. Those are clearly not text protocol either.

So even if you want to interact with the text protocol used inside that TLS-encrypted connection, you'll need to use a tool because netcat or telnet won't cut it.

Let's look at HTTP, because this is a HTTP/2 article.

That tool could be the openssl s_client, but as you can see that is kind of cumbersome:
echo -en "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\nConnection: close\n\n" | openssl s_client -ign_eof -host slashdot.org -port 443 -servername slashdot.org

But I suggest you just use:
curl -I https://slashdot.org/

The main developer for cURL works for Mozilla these days and is one of the people working on the HTTP/2 implementation in Firefox and is writing a document explaining HTTP/2: http://daniel.haxx.se/http2/
So as you would expect Curl supports HTTP/2:
https://github.com/http2/http2...

Basically every browser include 'developer tools' which will also let you see the headers and everything else you are used from HTTP/1.x.

I would rather see we all move to using encrypted protocols then that we can still use telnet.

People had been complaining about misleading "download" ads on TortoiseSVN's download page for years, and the maintainer, Stefan Küng, refused to do anything about it, basically saying he develops TSVN for free, so he's entitled to as much ad money as he can get. Even reasonable suggestions such as putting a border around the ad that said "Advertisement" were rejected. I had even offered to donate to the project if he put a labeled border around the ads. While I don't have any problems with him getting ad revenue, I did have a problem with him relying on deception to get it. So, I suggested that anyone who found the ad placement misleading file a policy violation report with Google ("The site makes it difficult to distinguish ads from content."). In response, he killfiled me and banned me from the tortoisesvn-users list. Talk about butthurt :P. But perhaps the reports had an effect, since he did add the border as had been suggested. And I donated 150 euros to the project. And I still think Stefan Küng is an asshole (which I mentioned in my Paypal note to him :)

People had been complaining about misleading "download" ads on TortoiseSVN's download page for years, and the maintainer, Stefan Küng, refused to do anything about it, basically saying he develops TSVN for free, so he's entitled to as much ad money as he can get. Even reasonable suggestions such as putting a border around the ad that said "Advertisement" were rejected. I had even offered to donate to the project if he put a labeled border around the ads. While I don't have any problems with him getting ad revenue, I did have a problem with him relying on deception to get it. So, I suggested that anyone who found the ad placement misleading file a policy violation report with Google ("The site makes it difficult to distinguish ads from content."). In response, he killfiled me and banned me from the tortoisesvn-users list. Talk about butthurt :P. But perhaps the reports had an effect, since he did add the border as had been suggested. And I donated 150 euros to the project. And I still think Stefan Küng is an asshole (which I mentioned in my Paypal note to him :)

People had been complaining about misleading "download" ads on TortoiseSVN's download page for years, and the maintainer, Stefan Küng, refused to do anything about it, basically saying he develops TSVN for free, so he's entitled to as much ad money as he can get. Even reasonable suggestions such as putting a border around the ad that said "Advertisement" were rejected. I had even offered to donate to the project if he put a labeled border around the ads. While I don't have any problems with him getting ad revenue, I did have a problem with him relying on deception to get it. So, I suggested that anyone who found the ad placement misleading file a policy violation report with Google ("The site makes it difficult to distinguish ads from content."). In response, he killfiled me and banned me from the tortoisesvn-users list. Talk about butthurt :P. But perhaps the reports had an effect, since he did add the border as had been suggested. And I donated 150 euros to the project. And I still think Stefan Küng is an asshole (which I mentioned in my Paypal note to him :)

Let me introduce you to wget and curl.

wput don't work with http...

no command line HTTP file transfer clients ever sprang up

Let me introduce you to wget and curl.

+1 Funny. But apparently you can install it

This is what I found: http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2009-01/0702.shtml I was assuming McAfee cause it has been so painful in other areas - 3.5 hours to copy 10Gig (100,000 files) from one drive to another. But maybe that is also partly NTFS. Same copy was 15 minutes on my mac. But, I have the option to move a bunch of my devs to Linux, and will do so asap.

This is for Debian, maybe not for Ubuntu: bjorn.haxx.se/debian reports when packages can go into "testing".
openoffice.org 3.1.0-5

I would like it if in Debian-like linux distro's, mono can be easily uninstalled (which also un-installs all "dependent" packages (programs and libraries)). This means that if I've installed your apps, and if (for whatever reason) I decide to purge mono from my system, that I would have to give up using your apps, too.
So far, so good. My personal gripe is if important packages (Debian version of openoffice.org 3.1.0-5) that everyone uses are dependent on mono.
Do you happen to be one of the developers of openoffice.org?
On the bjorn.haxx.se site describing when packages go into testing, there seems to be somewhere a "Build-Depends:" of the openoffice.org package on mono, which is why openoffice 3.1 is currently not yet in Debian testing.
Before you flame me, I know that this doesn't mean that all openoffice.org programs actually depend on mono, it's probably only for cli-uno-bridge, but I would strongly prefer an openoffice.org NOT dependent on mono, and then if necessary, an openoffice.org-extras-mono package containing those parts dependent on mono.
I haven't yet had time to open a wishlist bug against openoffice.org. Sorry.

From bjorn.haxx.se (please think of the slashdot effect). I found this surprising.

captcha: arrogant

It's not all that hard to do when you control the software on the device:
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2009/03/14/rockboxitunes/

Apple is the new Microsoft.

And like Microsoft, Apple also patents ideas with clear prior art. Take a look at Daniel Stenberg's post about two cases where Apple patented ideas that were included in Rockbox years before.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

> I don't think the process of migrating packages from unstable to testing is quite as
> automatic as you describe. At least, the most important packages (like linux, gcc, glibc,
> dpkg, python, xorg, gnome, kde, ...) don't migrate automatically. These transitions are
> made only when the maintainers think they're ready to be included in the next stable
> debian release and when they're sure that they don't break anything.

The process is automatic. There is even a script to tell you why a particular package in unstable is not yet in testing (see http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=firefox). The following description is from Debian (http://www.debian.org/devel/testing):

> The "testing" distribution is an automatically generated distribution. It is generated
> from the "unstable" distribution by a set of scripts which attempt to move over packages
> which are reasonably likely to lack release-critical bugs. They do so in a way that
> ensures that dependencies of other packages in testing are always satisfiable.

Given the rule that new upload cannot break dependencies before entering testing, it is natural that unless there is some "manual pushing", major updates to these highly depended on packages nearly never happen automatically. The manual manipulation is done to let (force?) them in testing anyway, even though some other package would become uninstallable.

Every time I sit down at a Mac I inevitably end up swearing at the lack of a util I'm used to having (why no wget?).

And why are folders like /etc so hard to find in finder?

I don't think you have to have a release date -- couldn't a list of milestones with expected and actual completion dates be enough to get a sense of progress? Consider Debian's dependency toplist, as an example of something that doesn't project out release dates, albeit with Ubuntu's twice-yearly releases as the counterexample.

Anet was the one where `anything goes', and yes, it did have a server called eris. The big thing that went on Anet that didn't go on Efnet was that new servers didn't need a password to connect to the existing network (well, the server `eris' was like this anyways -- I don't know if others were too) -- anybody could bring up a server. Which sounds fine, this also means that these people can make themselves IRCops on their new server and can abuse that, and it's also simple to kill anybody off on the existing network just by pretending to be a server via some simple telnet commands. Anarchy. Anet died off pretty quickly.

This page is pretty informative.

I was referring to the server side. So using FS does keep the file data in an easily accessible format? I'd been under the impression that it didn't. Thanks for the tip.

Well, it's at least a bit more accessible then the BDB format. Here's what a FS repository looks like. The interesting folder is the "db" folder.

/var/svn/web # tree -L 2
.
|-- README.txt
|-- conf
| |-- authz
| |-- passwd
| `-- svnserve.conf
|-- dav
|-- db
| |-- current
| |-- format
| |-- fs-type
| |-- revprops
| |-- revs
| |-- transactions
| |-- uuid
| `-- write-lock
|-- format
|-- hooks
| |-- post-commit.tmpl
| |-- post-lock.tmpl
| |-- post-revprop-change.tmpl
| |-- post-unlock.tmpl
| |-- pre-commit.tmpl
| |-- pre-lock.tmpl
| |-- pre-revprop-change.tmpl
| |-- pre-unlock.tmpl
| `-- start-commit.tmpl
`-- locks
|-- db-logs.lock
`-- db.lock

In the "revs" and "revprops" folders are one file per revision commited to the server. The "revprops" files are plain text and look like:

# cat 92
K 10
svn:author
V 3
wuphon
K 8
svn:date
V 27
2006-11-05T02:20:12.153488Z
K 7
svn:log
V 15
import from VSS
END

However, the contents of each individual revision file in the "revs" directory is a lot more complex. It's a binary format, with content being compressed and delta'd off a previous revision (not always THE previous revision, SVN uses an algorithm to pick a revision lower down to delta off of). It would be possible to reconstruct the data, but would probably be easiest to use the SVN libraries to do so.

But as I said, assuming that the rev file was written correctly and then backed up. You can easily restore a rev file that gets corrupted at a later date. And since the rev files never change, you could even use tripwire or some other checksum utility to keep a guarded eye on those files. The biggest risk would be that SVN corrupts things as its writing to the revision file. That failure would be noticable fairly quickly by other users of the repository.

I can't find my notes (but this comes close) on how SVN picks base versions to create deltas off of for a particular revision. IIRC, to re-construct revision #100 of a file that had been revisioned 100 times, it only has to look at O(N log N) previous revisions instead of O(N). So it may need to read revision files {100, 92, 80, 65, 32, 5, 1} - or something like that. So if you were trying to retrieve the 100th revision of a file, but the 99th revision was corrupt, you'd still be able to get the contents of the 100th revision. You would only run into issues if the Nth revision was based off of a revision that had been corrupted.

So, for heavily edited files, there's a bit of redundancy built in.

for those of us who don't have them, here are the basics:

I was under the impression that even with FSFS you still needed to use the hotcopy.py script in order to get a guaranteed consistent backup.

I agree. There's more to this story than meets the eye.

According to this article, the underlying hardware is based on the e200 series of players. That's interesting because the e200 's most distinguishing feature is its support for both MTP mode (yuck, Media Transfer Protocol means "works on XP only, and you can only transfer files by politely asking WMP10/11+ for permission") and UMS (woohoo, USB Mass Storage, it mounts like every other USB drive on every OS in the world) mode.

There's also been rumors of interest from Sandisk in working with the Rockbox folks.

I speculate that Real is paying Sandisk a small fortune to place Real-branded (and Real-DRM-infected) firmware on the existing Sansa e200 hardware. The branding of the player "Sansa Rhapsody" doesn't stomp all over the "Sansa e2x0" series. Sandisk makes money off Real's licensing fees and the hardware even if the programme flops flat on its face. Sandisk, after all, is in the business of selling flash memory, not MP3 players - hence why the e200 is flash-based and has an expansion slot for MicroSD. If you're a flash manufacturer, high-capacity flash-based MP3 players are a great means of not just driving sales, but for boosting profit margins.

Sun have finally seen the light, and have created packages that allow distributors to include Java in their operating systems: https://jdk-distros.dev.java.net/.

After a few back-and-forths with Sun's legal department, even Debian have packaged it for their non-free section: http://packages.debian.org/src:sun-java5. Users can simply install the sun-java5-plugin package. In a few days time, the packages will be eligible for inclusion in the forthcoming Debian 4.0 ("etch") release.

To trigger it just try and do a diff on two revisions of a word document. I can't find any official docs on the net but they're part of the TortoiseSVN downloadable docs. http://svn.haxx.se/tsvnusers/archive-2005-11/0092. shtml talks about it for a bit.

Assuming vim 7 makes it into testing in 9 days time, it will be in the Debian 3.2 (Etch) release that might just arrive in December. ;)

If you don't want to upgrade from Stable then I suggest you want for vim 7 to enter the backports.org archive; someone will probably upload it at some point soon.

Google for "ssh subversion owner" led me straight to this...

http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2004-11/1261.shtm l

http://svn.haxx.se/users/archive-2005-04/0210.shtm l

Read-only unfortunately, but actually, that's quite useful for publishing a subversion repository to a webserver and *forcing* people to check changes into the repository to make them go live.

As this table shows, curl does not have "Recursive Downloads", which wget does. Which is the most useful feature of wget - you can point it at a pr0n link or gallery site like so:

wget -r -k -H --level=3

and it will follow all the pr0n links to three levels down, and retrieve all the pix/movies it links to. Saves you tens of hours of frustrated clicking and saving manually. Not that I personally use it for such vile things, of course :)

Just kidding.

http://curl.haxx.se/docs/faq.html

1.3 What is curl not?

Curl is *not* a wget clone. That is a common misconception. Never, during
curl's development, have we intended curl to replace wget or compete on its
market. Curl is targeted at single-shot file transfers.

And we've got proof!

If you weren't aware, a list of the SVN projects is here:
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2005-06/0975.shtml

You can find more on the status of the projects in the Subversion dev list archives. I believe David Anderson's "Path-based authorization for svnserve" project was completed. I haven't really been watching the rest of the SVN SoC projects.

with one click, push it up to a website as static pages, so I can host it on a site without scripts

How about Curl?

I use cURL on these:

>curl http://tinyurl.com/8xdkf

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>302 Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>
The document has moved <A HREF="http://forwarding.tinyurl.com/redirect.php?n um=8xdkf">here</A>.<P>
</BODY></HTML>

>cURL http://forwarding.tinyurl.com/redirect.php?num=8xd kf

Location: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB11178280 8075750561-moOzLbwRfVRAe_SqomVwCyG2Qds_20060606,00 .html?mod=blogs

Corkscrew (Unix, Windows) : Tunnel SSH connections through an HTTP proxy.

Curl (Unix, Windows) : Utility who permits to easily download and upload files by using different protocols: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, LDAP, ... Also supports proxies, cookies, authentification, resumes, ...

DesProxy (Unix, Windows) : Tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy, eventually by converting SOCKS requests.

FizzBounce (Unix) : TCP redirector through HTTP proxies.

HTTPort (Windows) [Closed source]: Tunnel TCP connections through the HTTP protocol, by simulating a SOCKS server, and by eventually using an intermediate server.

HTTPTunnel (Unix, Windows) : Bidirectionnal tunnel through HTTP requests, eventually through an HTTP proxy.

LibCurl (Unix, Windows) : Library who permits to easily download and upload files by using different protocols: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, LDAP, ... Also supports proxies, cookies, authentification, resumes, and lots of languages: C, C++, Perl, ...

MultiProxy (Windows) [Closed source]: HTTP proxies tester. MultiProxy can be used as a proxy server who use a different proxy for each request.

Numby (Unix) : Scanner for HTTP vulnerables proxies.

Proxomitron (Windows) [Closed source]: Scanner and redirector through HTTP proxies, who can also delete or modify informations contained in HTML transferred pages. For example, this permits to easily filter automatic popups, DHTML or JavaScript.

ProxyTools (Unix, Windows) : Set of Perl utilities, who permits to use, sort, test and search for HTTP proxies.

TransConnect (Unix) : Transparently tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy.

Zylyx (Unix) : permits to access to files through HTTP proxy caches.

Corkscrew (Unix, Windows) : Tunnel SSH connections through an HTTP proxy.

Curl (Unix, Windows) : Utility who permits to easily download and upload files by using different protocols: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, LDAP, ... Also supports proxies, cookies, authentification, resumes, ...

DesProxy (Unix, Windows) : Tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy, eventually by converting SOCKS requests.

FizzBounce (Unix) : TCP redirector through HTTP proxies.

HTTPort (Windows) [Closed source]: Tunnel TCP connections through the HTTP protocol, by simulating a SOCKS server, and by eventually using an intermediate server.

HTTPTunnel (Unix, Windows) : Bidirectionnal tunnel through HTTP requests, eventually through an HTTP proxy.

LibCurl (Unix, Windows) : Library who permits to easily download and upload files by using different protocols: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, LDAP, ... Also supports proxies, cookies, authentification, resumes, and lots of languages: C, C++, Perl, ...

MultiProxy (Windows) [Closed source]: HTTP proxies tester. MultiProxy can be used as a proxy server who use a different proxy for each request.

Numby (Unix) : Scanner for HTTP vulnerables proxies.

Proxomitron (Windows) [Closed source]: Scanner and redirector through HTTP proxies, who can also delete or modify informations contained in HTML transferred pages. For example, this permits to easily filter automatic popups, DHTML or JavaScript.

ProxyTools (Unix, Windows) : Set of Perl utilities, who permits to use, sort, test and search for HTTP proxies.

TransConnect (Unix) : Transparently tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy.

Zylyx (Unix) : permits to access to files through HTTP proxy caches.

46 days since the maintainer asked for help moving a package with 0 outstanding bugs from unstable into testing
Well, if it has no bugs, why isn't it built on all architectures? http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=lib apache2-mod-fastcgi

• after they have been in unstable for a certain period of time (3/5/10 days, depending on the package type and priority, IIRC)
• have all dependencies in testing
• have no critical bugs filed against them
• are built sucessfully on all archs.

Arch attempts to redefine the whole concept of version control while Subversion just adopts the CVS model with a few changes.

The changes between CVS and SVN take a lot to get used to, but they are important. SVN revision numbers define the state of one's entire repository, not just an individual file's revisions like CVS does. In hindsight this change seems almost trivial, but it's a major re-think for the CVS users I've had to deal with.

Subversion still has come a long way but it still has a long way to go. It's right on the verge of entering stabilization for version 1.2.0 (which will include some basic, optional locking features). Though it'll probably take some time, I'm quite anxious to see the evolution of the merge tracking and "true rename" support.

One of the best things about svn is the documentation. The daily developer mailing list has a very high signal and very little noise. The O'Reilly book is free documentation. And if you want to pay for other info, I've found the Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion book to be a very good intro to version control in general.

If you want to toy around, look at grabbing an already compiled binary for your platform and follow directions for setting up a file-system based file-system rather than a database file system. At least until you get the hang of things more :-)

Sorry to spoil it for all you guys Read the thread for fun. They found a bug with large trees and fixed it.

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2005-02/1054.shtml

Hehe, amen. The day I figured out how to use http://curl.haxx.se/, porn became somewhat boring. It's just too easy to obtain.

On unix systems, ftp itself is scriptable. Other ideaswoul be to: http://curl.haxx.se/, http://lftp.yar.ru/ or using an expect script as an interface between your script and an ftp client. If you use python, use: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib.html, or ftplib. For Perl, use LWP, Net::FTP.

Try cURL. Available for every platform under the sun, and does almost everything.

Executive summary:

• The only technical regression from CVS to SVN is that 'svn blame' is still a lot slower than 'cvs annotate'.
• Let me just quote: No project should ever jump into a new version control system without experimenting with it first, or assessing the general impact it will have on development policies. Switching VC systems is never "just" about learning the syntax of a new program -- it always involves re-evaluating and re-creating all of your project's procedures.

By the way, the GCC team is starting to make experiments with svn, and it looks like they might switch in 2 or 3 months.

I like Subversion but you are command line parameters is the least problem in this kind of migration. There are cultural problems and difference in the work model.
Take a look at the Mono case study is really an eye opener.

What you are unknowingly referring to are the Archos MP3 hard drive based players. When the iPod 20 came out, I bought an Archos Jukebox 20 Recorder for exactly half the price. Admittedly, it was a tad larger than the Apple which also gets points for style, but since when did geeks begin caring about carrying around the equivalent of e-jewelry? At the time, it was a more than viable alternative. It didn't hurt that the crazies over at Rockbox Firmware (down right now) rewrote the firmware for Archos systems. You can now develop your own apps for the system as well as enjoy total customization of the interface. They've added a "video" extension, a text file reader, and multilingual support, among other things. Now, with the release of the new 20 gb Archos player, even smaller than the iPod and the around the same size as the iPod mini (2.9" x 2.3" x .7") albeit with a larger screen (2"), I am beginning to believe that a new era of iPod competition is being reigned in.