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Scarab is a fork or reimplementation of Bugzilla. Kind of like a Bugzilla next generation.

Any chance that Deskzilla will work with Scarab? Are the Scarab folks working on the necessary back end hooks?

Scarab: http://scarab.tigris.org/

Autoversioning is a feature whereby generic WebDAV clients can write to a DeltaV server (like mod_dav_svn), and the server performs commits silently in the background. This means that if you use Apache httpd as your Subversion server, then most modern operating systems can mount the repository as a network share, and non-technical users get "transparent" versioning for free. (Of course, technical users can still use Subversion clients to examine repository history.)

Use Dia http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ to create UML diagrams. Then use tedia2sql http://tedia2sql.tigris.org/ to create sql scripts for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle or other RDBMS. For PostgreSQL you have pg_autodoc http://www.rbt.ca/autodoc/ to create diagrams and HTML documentation directly from database server.

Regarding VSS, the *ONLY* benefit over other solutions is Visual Studio integration, other SCC solutions give you this ability as well, unfortunately, iirc VS only supports one type of SCC to be active in the install at a time... I would suggest looking into Subversion + AnkhSVN, or Vault .. it's a pain to setup a repository in windows, but it works pretty well.. :) using cvsnt + tortoisecvs for most of my home stuff..

Regarding VSS, the *ONLY* benefit over other solutions is Visual Studio integration, other SCC solutions give you this ability as well, unfortunately, iirc VS only supports one type of SCC to be active in the install at a time... I would suggest looking into Subversion + AnkhSVN, or Vault .. it's a pain to setup a repository in windows, but it works pretty well.. :) using cvsnt + tortoisecvs for most of my home stuff..

. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

If you're looking to do it well, I'd recommend :

Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/
Trac (http://trac.edgewall.com/

The combination of those will give you :

- Bug tracking (let the customer have access etc, and they'll feel good ;))
- Source code viewing
- Timeline (commits, what changed when etc)
- Integration between bugs (tickets) and source code via the Timeline
- Milestones
- Wiki for documentation, design notes etc.

Version control is essential for systems administration. You need a good, working "undo" button. That's what version control gives you. But VC works best with text files, not the registry. So switching to XML config files will give IIS admins a chance to bring their practises closer to those used by Apache admins (and the rest of the Unix sysadmin world).

-Dom

Add Tigris.org to your list of Sourceforge alternatives for collaborative software.

It's is part of my job to stay informed about IT in general.

If you read Slashdot the "right" way, you can get some very interesting insights and ideas.

You can't imagine what I've seen on slashdot for the first time, which has become productive in the company I work for.

- The linux vserver project http://linux-vserver.org/
- subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/
- svg (see previous story)
- Phpcache http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/
- Ajax (I know it's mainly a buzzword at the moment but my current project already bennefits)

And numerous discusions about security.

See, slashdot is not my main source of information, but it leads to information.

Yeah it took me a while to figure out why the http_proxy env variable didn't work. Then, you need to ask your sysadmin (if that's not you) to open up the ports (like for squid)

IMHO a programming language's productivity does not depend on the language itself but on how it is used and whether it's features meet the requirements of the application or not.

If an application does not require the use of object oriented programming, why then use a object oriented programming language?

Have you even considered that there are systems which do not come with Python, Ruby or Java preinstalled or are not even supported by those languages?
But almost every modern operating system has native support for binary executables.

And by the way, Subversion runs on a lot of platforms (http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#portability ), maybe even more than Java does.

Putting your stuff into a version control system, such as subversion and checking it out to a remote machine is a great way to do distributed backups.

Other tools that I've used to get a complete continuous integration cycle up and running for a large development project I'm currently working on are Subversion (for the server) and TortoiseSVN (for developer PCs). They are full-featured, free, and work well with NAnt/CC.NET out of the box.

Other tools that I've used to get a complete continuous integration cycle up and running for a large development project I'm currently working on are Subversion (for the server) and TortoiseSVN (for developer PCs). They are full-featured, free, and work well with NAnt/CC.NET out of the box.

I was looking at this a few weeks ago (Using Subversion 1.2).

This official document says that SVN only supports a subset of WebDAV & DeltaV. Has that hindered your usage at all? I'm not sure if the document is up-to-date

I know that WebDAV support was greatly enhanced with the 1.2 version, but I haven't had a chance to do much research yet.

Subversion works over WebDAV, and it supports versioning.

I'm curious if Subversion could be used as a regular WebDAV server for this sort of use. Not quite sure how the versioning would work, since regular folks don't want to have a check-in comment every time they add a file to the repository ...

you should check out subversion.

the problem with just uploading to a web folder is you end up with many versions of the same files and lose track of which is which. also, there are problems with clobbering newer versions of files with older ones.

with version control you always know which is the latest version of your file and can roll back to previous versions if you make a mistake (like super-undo). the windows client tortoisesvn integrates right into te windows explorer and is very simple to use once you have your repository set up. there is also a nice os x client svnx. on linux, of course, you can just use the 'svn' cli.

you should check out subversion.

the problem with just uploading to a web folder is you end up with many versions of the same files and lose track of which is which. also, there are problems with clobbering newer versions of files with older ones.

with version control you always know which is the latest version of your file and can roll back to previous versions if you make a mistake (like super-undo). the windows client tortoisesvn integrates right into te windows explorer and is very simple to use once you have your repository set up. there is also a nice os x client svnx. on linux, of course, you can just use the 'svn' cli.

I had been using subclipse (http://subclipse.tigris.org/) with Eclipse 3.0 for SVN support and it worked great in both Windows and Linux. Something broke part of subclipse around 3.1RC3 to the point that I couldn't add or browse repositories. Just a tip that I figured out, though: if you use a normal SVN tool (TortoiseSVN, SVN CLI) to check out a project, then when you import the project into Eclipse subclipse will be able to work with the repo just fine (as of RC7, still downloading 3.1 final).

Derek

have you been living under a rock? Google "Linus Subversion" and it's the first link.

http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html

From what I understand about Zorn, it will allow you to create Flash applications via the Flex framework in Eclipse. Flex is essentially an XML syntax for building Flash applications. It's much more geared to the developer market than the designer oriented Flash IDE. So IMHO, this is a great fit, and good news for Linux developers. Now we just need a 64 bit Flash player for Linux...

"What you don't know about testing, would float a battleship."

Does the Firefox team use any automated testing on the project? Seems like these sort of errors could stay dead, if so.

Software testing automation tools

Free Software is too content with simply reverse-engineering or mimicking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary software. Copying Microsoft Word feature by feature and opening up the source code is not freedom. Mimesis is misery.

Whilst there is at least the beginnings of a move to collaborate with designers and other users to produce replica DTP packages ... there is a need to go further. Where it seems open or free approaches are most fruitful at present is in small software, making specific interventions to precise technical, economic and social problematics. ... Geek drives to innovation must, as awkwardly and confusingly as it will happen, be coupled with the drive to make language, to cut the word up, open, and into process.

That said, I don't think McVoy is necessarily coming from the right place, and I am not convinced that Free Software is inherently imitative. Certainly RMS started with a project to create free alternatives to useful software, and such an objective seems useful in many fields. And it has also been proven time and time again that open source can match and exceed the quality of proprietary products... I tend to agree with RMS that until we can do our daily work using free tools, innovation (at least radical innovation) maybe needs to take a back seat - not that it is in any way excluded!

Take Subversion for example. It's easy to see it as a "cvs clone" - although it adds substantial value. Sometimes a free work-alike is a very valuable thing in itself (probably the best example of this is Linux).

Everything I've heard from McVoy makes him sound like an avaricious, self-interested twit, and this latest serving of hyperbole seems very well timed to boost interest in his product right at the moment when his destructive antics are leading a lot of smart people might have second thoughts about a product with such capricious licensing.

The thing I like about the FreePascal crowd is that they don't go overboard adding shortcuts and special rules. I remember trying out GPC, and wondering if there was any hope of porting one of my frameworks to it, but it's practically Alice-in-Wonderland-esque in there. At least, my impression was that the ground was constantly shifting. Heck, you can use & and | instead of and and or.

I'm pleased also to hear that FreePascal is moving to Subversion - we've been using Subversion as a version control system for a while, and it's a very, very nice alternative to CVS.

I'm also glad that FreePascal has introduced interfaces. We've been forging a very nice foundational class library from interfaces. I have a few presentations put together for CDUG here in town, specifically for Delphi, but now relevant to FreePascal. (I wonder if the Generics trick will work in FP or not :)

Lazarus was still very, very rough around the edges last I checked. Perhaps after my wedding, I'll have time to poke my nose in there and at least help clean things up :)

-- Ritchie

We've been using Trac for this. Good stuff, assuming you manage your code in Subversion.

CVS isn't working to keep pace because the CVS developers put CVS into maintenance mode so they could work on the successor: SVN.

You are ultra-super-gimptarded.

It can be confusing.

AnkhSVN is a VS.NET plugin. However, I'd encourage you to check out the really excellent TortoiseSVN client. I think one of the main reasons people like IDE integration is they're so used to the extra hassle that first checking out, editing and remembering what files to checkin, that the lock-modify-unlock model imposes. With Subversion's copy-modify-merge model and TortoiseSVN's recursive-oriented commit dialog, I think tight IDE integration looses much of it's usefulness.

It can be confusing.

AnkhSVN is a VS.NET plugin. However, I'd encourage you to check out the really excellent TortoiseSVN client. I think one of the main reasons people like IDE integration is they're so used to the extra hassle that first checking out, editing and remembering what files to checkin, that the lock-modify-unlock model imposes. With Subversion's copy-modify-merge model and TortoiseSVN's recursive-oriented commit dialog, I think tight IDE integration looses much of it's usefulness.

Apologies, I misread: http://subversion.tigris.org/project_packages.html as not having a server, rather just not running on windows 98. I'll take a look, although does it have support for vs.net?

It is actually rather trivial to run a subversion server on Windows if you like. That is how we run it for our development team. Took like all of 10 minutes to get it install, configured, etc.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/docs/TortoiseSVN_en/ ch03.html

Will give you information on how to setup a subversion server under windows.

Did you look into RapidSVN? I haven't tried it myself, but it may be an interesting alternative to TortoiseSVN if you want support for platforms other than windows.

There's also a Subversion plugin for Eclipse, in case you're using that.

The main one tends to be lack of tracking of file/directory renames. CVS does not really handle this at all while Subversion handles this very well.

Subversion also treats a commit of changes to multiple files as an atomic operation. This is a major benefit. You can easily see what all went into a specific commit (bug fix/etc) without trying to track down each file that it happened to. You also never have to worry about part of your commit being on the server and part of it not. It either is committed or it is not. CVS can not do that. (Well, beyond a single file that is)

Another major issue is the client/server relationship. Subversion has a very clean client/server interface. It is orthogonal, well designed, and relatively low overhead. CVS can not claim this to be the case. In fact, CVS's client/server features were bolted on after-the-fact and show it.

Subversion can work via HTTP/HTTPS protocols via an Apache plugin. In fact, it is not just HTTP but WebDAV and DeltaV protocol based, which means that there are other tools that can play with the repository as a auto-revisioned filesystem.

Subversion makes it possible to do some advanced web interfaces rather easily, such as the Insurrection http://insurrection.tigris.org/ does.

For me, once Subversion 1.1 came out there was no reason to look back at CVS other than legacy systems. (Subversion 1.0 was already better but it was 1.1 that finally put be over the edge.)

SubVersion is available for Windows as well.

For windows we use TortoiseSVN http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

This is one of the best windows based svn clients I've seen.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Check the main subversion page for some examples, or try that google thing.

Although trac is quite good and integrates well with SubVersion, it has a few disadvantages, the main one being no support for multiple projects.

Scarab, the open-source bug tracking tool that CollabNet's commercial offering uses and GForge, although cumbersome to setup are IMHO better alternatives if you're looking for bug-tracking tools to use along with SubVersion

--
Ravi

Subversion's really intended to be as close to a drop-in replacement for CVS as possible - except with most of the huge design flaws fixed.

The feature I most notice (I use Subversion at work, albeit with a fairly small dev team) is the ability to do handle file renames properly (preserving history). Atomic commits (of groups of files) are also nice.

There are lots of other important features of course, but I tend to use it just as a better CVS - which role it fills admirably.

• To check in a file, I have to pop up the package explorer, find the file, right-click, select Team->Commit...

Nah. Just right-click in the text editor view and select Team -> Commit from the context menu.

(This is Eclipse 3.1M6; I don't remember how long this feature has existed. Same disclaimer goes for the items below.)

And have you looked at the Team Synchronizing perspective? In this perspective you get a project-level diff between the working version and the repository; it will show outgoing and incoming modifications as well as conflicts, and it's a wonderful way to commit or update. It also supports commit sets, which let you set up the changeset without accessing the server, and then, when you're done, commit it as a whole.

• CVS updates require way too many mouse clicks. It always asks me if I want to update from a different tag (this is rarel, if ever, done; the update command should just update the current tag without an intermediate dialog).

Team -> Update will never ask for a tag; it defaults to the branch you're working on.

• Once the update command finishes, the output is simply discarded, making it harder to see what files were patched, modified, conflict, etc.

The CVS console shows this information, and the output is almost identical to that of the official CVS client. Window -> Show View -> Console, then make sure it's showing the CVS console by selecting this from the dropdown inside the view (as there are other types of consoles).

• other version control system (RCS, subversion, etc.)

While Eclipse only has CVS integration out of the box, there are third-party plugins providing support for Subversion, Perforce, ClearCase, an experimental system called Stellation, and others.

As for RCS, keep in mind that Eclipse has a powerful, and very useful, local history function that transparently maintains older versions of your source files. You can define the maximum age of this history. No commit messages or tagging, however.

"Ewe herd it here first"

Oh. That's just baaaaad.

Time to get back on topic, that's enough subversion of this thread.

The article has the sequence of events wrong: what actually happened was that BitMover Inc changed the BitKeeper license to shut out developers who work on competing open source systems, and BitMover did this only after Linus had selected BitKeeper as the version control software for the Linux Kernel.

The discussions the kernel team had about choosing BitKeeper were based on the assumption of zero-cost licenses for all open source developers who wanted to contribute to or follow kernel development. At this time, there was nothing in the BK license about excluding developers who work on competing software.

Then, later, BitMover changed the license, after Linus et al had gone to the trouble of making the switch. There's a term for this: "bait and switch".

See also http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html

-Karl Fogel

[Disclaimer: my viewpoint only, not speaking for my employer.]

I'd check out the ReadySet project, hosted on Tigris: http://readyset.tigris.org/.

ReadySet is a collection of templates in HTML and CSS for project requirements and specification. Even if they're not perfect for your organization, they can serve as a starting point.

Re. subversion, read this from the horses mouth: http://subversion.tigris.org/subversion-linus.html

As for monotone, I think Linus and others like it but find it too slow (http://kerneltrap.org/node/4982) to the extent that it would take a year to import the entire source repository at the moment.

- Peder

What would put Monotone and Bazaar in a class above Subversion?

I'm not trying to back Subversion here, it's just that I'm slightly familiar with it and am interested in knowing what limitations it might impose that these other systems might not.

What features are needed/why BK is so great is a long topic, but being fully decentralized and being able to run over email are some of the major features.

Being able to run over email is an interesting feature... one I'm not sure I understand the need for, if you have to have a fully-featured client to do merges and the like anyway. I guess it's so you don't need to assume network availability ? What does that mean, 'run over email'... it sounds a bit like a method of 'client-independant server API', why provide that functionality over mail and not in some other manner as well?

Is there a forum or something somewhere that this whole 'What features are needed and why" discussion can be examined ? What Linux kernel development list(s) should I be looking at if I'm interested ?

Thank you, and have a nice day.

As we all know, Linus has more resources at his disposal than Bill Gates. Why can't he just have some of his minions design, from scratch, a distributed source configuration management package that can do everything he needs, and have it ready within six months? Then, he and his crew could suffer along with Subversion and the distribution problems it will pose for them, for six months, before Linux can be hosted on Linus' own DSCM software.

It shouldn't be quite that hard to do, with all the resources he has... When Theo had a problem with (I believe it was) the license for the SSH program included prior to OpenBSD 2.6, he thought about it for a while and then busted out his own implementation. If he could do that, then Linus with all his resources can bust out a DSCM.

Yes, this post is totally sarcastic. But seriously, who said you can't take Subversion, rip out its guts, and make it distribution-aware.

Is Subversion decentralized? Even the Subversion maintainers admit that the Linux kernel development atmosphere doesn't mesh well with the centralized CVS/SVN model. There exists SVK, a decentralized hack on Subversion, but is it mature?

Linus is looking into Monotone as you can see here.

Might want to start figuring out how to migrate to that, instead of pestering him about subversion.