Subversion

SubConf 2009 – A Report

Posted about 10 hours ago by nob...@example.com (Senthil Kumaran S)

SubConf is the annual conference of Subversion (Version Control System)
project community. SubConf 2009 is the third such event which was held in
Munich, Germany from 27-29th October 2009. Though SubConf is a User
Conference wherein ... [More] subversion users from various parts of the world take
part, we do have developer hackathons in which subversion core developers
come together discuss subversion roadmap, hack code, etc. The developers
also meet the users to get feedback about subversion and also study the
user needs so that the future releases can cater to user needs. This year
we had a three day conference which was a great success.

Dscn0076

We had 10 core developers of Subversion project at the conference venue
namely Stephen Butler – Elego, Stefan Sperling – Elego, Neels Hofmeyr –
Elego, Julian Foad – WANdisco, Greg Stein – Popular Open Source
Developer, Hyrum K. Wright - Subversion Corp, Lieven Govaerts, Bert
Huijben - The Competence Group, Senthil Kumaran - Collabnet, Inc, C.
Michael Pilato - Collabnet, Inc. All the core developers were locked up
(Hackathon) for all the 3 days in a room in the conference hotel where
they discussed about various things related to Subversion development
such as Working Copy Next Generation (WC-NG) library, usage of scratch
pool, iterpool in subversion code base, release roadmap, interesting
issues to work on, etc. Of course hackathon was not just discussion, we
also had some real productive programming done, there were approximately
70 commits to the subversion repository with close to +46696/-36666 lines
of change!

The first day of the conference started officially in the evening around
7:00pm with Subversion RoundaTable where users of subversion from various
organization post their queries and feedback about Subversion. They also
explored the possibilities of getting a feature introduced in future
releases of Subversion. This was a fruitful discussion which brings in
new requirements to the Subversion Open Source project every year,
directly from the actual users.

Dscn0233

On the second day of the conference we had many talks scheduled regarding
Version Control Systems. The keynote was delivered by C. Michael Pilato
who is a long term (from Jan 2001) Subversion developer. He spoke on the
history of Subversion, the way the community works, why CollabNet chose
to make Subversion a Open Source Project etc. This was refreshing to see
the legacy and the advancements that had gone through in the Subversion
Community through the years! The Subversion developers would like (which
also forms the message from subversion developers via the conference) the
users to do real testing of the pre-release versions (we don't want you
to try on production data, though) of Subversion software to catch bugs
early and due to the difficulty developers face (mainly due to computing
resources) in order to mimic the varied environments in which subversion
is deployed in organizations. The developers are interested to hear from
organizations which are interested in offering resources to work on
testing Subversion and welcome any such potential prospects. The users
requested accessibility for pre-release version of Subversion binaries
which the Subversion community is not engaged in providing other than the
source tarballs, but the developers took a note of it, that they will
work on some mechanism to get it done in future. FWIW, Subversion project
in the recent past has started providing nightly tarballs of latest trunk
development sources - http://orac.ece.utexas.edu/pub/svn/nightly/

Some of the talks given on the second day and third day of the conference
were as follows (there were even more talks, but they were non-English):

*

Subversion Release Process by Hyrum Wright (Release manager of
Subversion project) and Stefan Sperling

*

Bringing Subversion to the Java (TM) World by Alexander Kitaev and
Alexander Sinyushkin

*

WC-NG (Subversion's new working copy management library) by Hyrum
Wright

*

Comparing Apples to Oranges – Subversion, git and Mercurial by Stefan
Sperling and Stephen Butler

*

Moving from SVN to Mercurial by Zsolt Koppany and Janos Koppany

*

Server Side Java bindings for Suvbersion by Dave Brown

*

SVN Obliterate by Julian Foad

*

Coding Control by Tony Smith from Perforce Software

See http://2009.subconf.de/vortraege/1-konferenztag/ ,
http://2009.subconf.de/vortraege/2-konferenztag/ for presentation slides.

Another interesting take away from the conference was Subversion
Community's feeling about Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). The
community is excited about DVCS, since we are part of advancing the
“State of the Art” and we are happy that, ultimately we have competitors
in the version control world :) With the latest improvements on WC-NG
library, Subversion will be able to get features like offline commits,
shelving, etc which are premature to talk now, but are possible in the
foreseeable future.

It was a nice experience for me to lurk around with the Subversion
Developers at the Conference, whom I ve known for the past 2 years via
email communication. We also had a surprise on the following week after
the conference with the announcement made at ApacheCon 2009, about
Subversion project finding a new home in Apache Software Foundation! With
such kind of announcements and user conferences Subversion Community
advances in a faster pace to make this extraordinary piece of Version
Control software even better!

Related links

Detailed Report - Day1

Detailed Report - Day2

Detailed Report - Day3

Pictures - Day1

Pictures - Day2

Pictures - Day3

SubConf website [Less]

grepWin 1.3.5

Posted 1 day ago by nob...@example.com (Stefan)

A new version of grepWin is out: version 1.3.5

A few bugs were fixed and a few new features implemented. You can see the
details of every change in the issue tracker.

Early review of Canon 5D Mark II

Posted 2 days ago by nob...@example.com (Ben Collins-Sussman)

I just upgraded from a Canon 30D DSLR to a 5D Mark II. Here are my
preliminary thoughts after a day of use, as someone who’s never owned a
full-frame DSLR before.

The first and most obvious thought I have is: what unbelievable ... [More] clarity.
It seems to come from a combination of a massive LCD on the back with 4x
more resolution and seeing MUCH more of the world through the viewfinder.
It’s like getting a new set of eyes — I had no idea all this stuff was
out there. I also feel less removed from the scene, more immersed.
Looking through the old 30D now feels like peering through a tunnel.

[IMAGE]

The next big shock is that my lenses are all different now. Not having
the 1.6x zoom factor is a big deal. I used to have a 30mm prime
(effective 48mm), but usually rely on my 24-70mm lens as my main “walk
around lens”, because it was effectively 38-112mm. Now my 24-70 is
*really* 24-70, and it’s amazing to see how truly wide-angle 24mm really
is. I even get a bit of moving-fisheye effect. Considering I have very
little interest in landscape photography (and mostly focus on portraits),
the whole 24-50mm range isn’t very interesting to me. I find myself
either using the ‘nifty 50′ for simple creative stuff, or using my 70-200
as the walk-around lens. What a shift!

[IMAGE]

A scary thing is that RAW file size has gone from from ~8MB to ~24MB.
It’s no longer painless to access my photos over a NAS drive via 802.11N
wi-fi. I’m clearly going to have to move the whole photo library to a
‘miniature’ 500GB disk plugged directly into USB, and then be sure to
back up this disk alongside my NAS disk.

[IMAGE]

There’s a nice bevy of UI improvements. It’s clear that Canon knows their
target audience is professional photographers, since the cheesy
“automatic modes” (portrait, sports, landscape, etc.) are gone from the
dial. Fair enough. But I’m baffled as to why they added a dedicated
button on the back to flip “picture modes”, which are modes that
strategically modify the hues and saturations of photos as you take them.
Does anyone actually use them, even in older generations of this camera?
Everyone I’ve ever met turns off the feature altogether (selects
‘neutral’ or ‘faithful’ modes). We all adjust the colors in
post-production anyway. The whole feature smells of the automatic modes
they’ve already nixed.

[IMAGE]

The two party tricks of this DSLR are the live-view feature (just like
point-n-shoot cameras) and the ability to record HD 1080p video at 30
frames/sec. Pretty impressive stuff. I doubt I’ll ever use the live view
mode, and I’ve not quite figured out how to shoot video well. Of course,
when 3 minutes of video takes up a whole gigabyte of space, I’m going to
be conservative with it!

But still, if somebody said, “hey, your DSLR now has live-view mode on
its rear LCD”, what would you expect the interface to be? Just a button
that flips it on and off, right? Sure. What else would it possibly be?
Hmmm. There’s definitely a dedicated button to activate the feature, but
pushing the button seems to convert the camera into an entirely different
beast. Suddenly controls don’t work the same, you have to choose one of
three alien autofocusing modes (including one which does continuous
facial recognition!). Making it autofocus actually momentarily
*interrupts* the live view. Everything seems weird, and even weirder when
shooting video. I’ve still not figured out how to make it continuously
autofocus during video recording — maybe it’s not possible at all. I need
to study the manual more. (But the video quality is VERY impressive
nonetheless. One less gadget to carry on outings with kids!)

[IMAGE]

Overall, I’m amazed. But as with any new tool, I’ve got a lot of learning
to do. [Less]

IBM Rational ClearCase support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0

Posted 4 days ago by nob...@example.com (Rob Parker)

Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 Update 4 has been added for IBM
Rational ClearCase versions 7.0.1.7 and 7.0.0.8. Refer to Technote
1239315 System Requirements for ClearCase

Subversion - As Strong As Ever

Posted 4 days ago by Richard Murray

Subversion - As Strong As Ever

Posted 4 days ago by nob...@example.com (Richard Murray)

Yesterday at ApacheCon I witnessed a significant milestone for CollabNet,
the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and Subversion. The
CollabNet-sponsored Subversion project and The Apache Software Foundation
(ASF) announced that the ... [More] Subversion project has formally submitted itself
to the Apache Incubator in order to become part of the Foundation's
efforts. The announcement was greeted with a crescendo of applause at the
conference and with comments like ‘what a nice 10th birthday gift’. This
logical progression for Subversion comes as Apache and Subversion are
completing their first 10 years as open source communities. From a people
perspective, many of the same people founded and continue to work on both
projects. From a technology perspective, both projects utilize
capabilities of the other. In return this move is expected to benefit
Subversion and CollabNet by providing outreach into the large ASF
committer base and from their semi-annual developer events like today’s
ApacheCon that attracted an estimated 500 guests.

The transition for Subversion comes at a time when CollabNet’s
sponsorship has established Subversion as the market leading SCM product.
The ASF transition should help Subversion extend its position, that’s
right, extend its position. However, it crossed my mind that this move
might be perceived by some as an attempt to resurrect Subversion from a
downward activity trend. CollabNet and Subversion folks would say that
this is just not true, that Subversion is as strong as ever but is there
independent data to validate that? I decided to do some research of my
own by checking in at www.ohloh.net to gather some Subversion activity
metrics (thanks to the people over at Ohloh). Oh, and I added Git and
Mercurial to provide some additional color to my analysis. Here are some
interesting charts:

Code Commit Activity:

SVN-GIT-Mercurial commits

Line of Code Growth:

SVN-GIT-Mercurial codebase comparison

I’ll let you form your own conclusion but I believe that Subversion is as
strong as ever.

Next - my perspective on CollabNet and Subversion in 2010. [Less]

Subversion moving to the Apache Software Foundation

Posted 4 days ago by nob...@example.com (Ben Collins-Sussman)

It’s no longer a secret, but now a public press release.

Not that this should shock anybody, but in case you didn’t know, now you
do. The overlap between Apache and Subversion communities has always been
huge since day one — ... [More] with essentially identical cultures. We’ve talked
about doing this for years. It means we can finally dissolve the
‘Subversion corporation’ and let ASF handle all our finances and legal
needs.

“Why didn’t this happen sooner? Why now?”, you may ask. There are several
answers.

First, the intellectual property was scattered. Collabnet owned a huge
chunk of it, but so did other corporations and a large handful of other
random volunteers from the internet. The ASF requires software grants to
join, and we didn’t have our eggs in one basket.

Second, when the Subversion project first developed legal needs a few
years ago — and also started receiving money from Google’s Summer of Code
— it was relatively easy to set up our own non-profit. It gave us a place
for money to live, and an entity to defend the Subversion trademark from
a number of abusive third parties.

But over time, running our own non-profit turned out to be an awkward
time suck. So about a year ago I started focusing on collecting
Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) from both individuals and
corporations, including Collabnet itself. Once the IP was all
concentrated in the Subversion Corporation, it freed us up to move to the
ASF of dump all of the bureaucracy on them. :-)

So this announcement is also a bit of a point of pride for myself. I’ve
long stopped working on Subversion code, but I wanted to make sure the
project was parked in a good place before I could really walk away
guilt-free. I now feel like my “work is done”, and that the ASF will be
an excellent long-term home for the project. This is exactly what the ASF
specializes in: being a financial and legal umbrella for a host of
communities over the long haul. The project is in excellent hands now.

Of course, Collabnet has always been the main supplier of “human capital”
for the project in terms of full-time programmers writing code, and
that’s not going to change as far as I can see. Collabnet deserves huge
kudos for the massive financial investment (and risk) in funding this
project for nearly 10 years, and it seems clear they’re going to continue
to be the “center” of project direction and corporate support for years
to come. And this pattern isn’t uncommon either: the Apache HTTPD Server
itself is mostly made up of committers working on behalf of interested
corporations.

What’s interesting to me, however, are all the comments on the net about
how this is a “death knell” for Subversion — as though the ASF were some
sort of graveyard. That seems like a very typical viewpoint from the open
source universe — mistaking mature software like Apache or Subversion (or
anything not new and shiny) for “old and crappy”. In my opinion, the open
source world seems to ignore the other 90% of programmers working in tiny
software shops that utterly rely on these technologies as foundational.
Even though I’ve become a Mercurial user myself, I can assure you that
these other products aren’t going away anytime soon!

Hm. I smell another talk here. [Less]

TortoiseSVN 1.6.6 released.

Posted 18 days ago by nob...@example.com (Stefan)

TortoiseSVN 1.6.6 has been released.

This is a bugfix release/maintenance release.

We recommend that you update your TortoiseSVN client to this latest
version. You can get it from our download page.

Subversion 1.6.6 Released

Posted 19 days ago

I'm happy to announce Subversion 1.6.6, available ... [More] from:

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.tar.bz2
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.zip
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.bz2
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.gz
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.zip

The MD5 checksums are:

e5109da756d74c7d98f683f004a539af subversion-1.6.6.tar.bz2
0ab0f26f6eb056add1b9d3059a3f4247 subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz
a6939e209bb42038fc7b7e1a5f8ea7fd subversion-1.6.6.zip
8ec2a0daea27f86a75939d3ed09618a0 subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.bz2
2665b35dbf1f0a33c3f3b460b0bf7dd3 subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.gz
bec1ddc026df3998fafc3cfb39c13401 subversion-deps-1.6.6.zip

The SHA1 checksums are:

01b03d04660fa5d1f76c742b0f8a38bf1ca1a507 subversion-1.6.6.tar.bz2
7a307a9be882e5ec488bf5a26b46e7831a725d29 subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz
b7e24889501d62957b493f1009c5c90effe639b2 subversion-1.6.6.zip
164999e9063a88aa0fcee818eeb36cd5b6c94904 subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.bz2
e51d465169f37a6d3c67af74a861c1f41c31b994 subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.gz
7fc7b89ec37bed4e0580e0171826880a77b6cf37 subversion-deps-1.6.6.zip

PGP Signatures are available at:

http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.tar.bz2.asc
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.tar.gz.asc
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.6.zip.asc
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.bz2.asc
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.tar.gz.asc
http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.6.zip.asc

For this release, the following people have provided PGP signatures:

Senthil Kumaran S [1024D/6CCD4038] with fingerprint:
8035 16A5 1D6E 50E2 1ECD DE56 F68D 46FB 6CCD 4038
C. Michael Pilato [1024D/1706FD6E] with fingerprint:
20BF 14DC F02F 2730 7EA4 C7BB A241 06A9 1706 FD6E
Paul T. Burba [1024D/53FCDC55] with fingerprint:
E630 CF54 792C F913 B13C 32C5 D916 8930 53FC DC55
Julian Foad [1024D/353E25BC] with fingerprint:
6604 5A4B 43BC F994 7777 5728 351F 33E4 353E 25BC
Bert Huijben [1024D/9821F7B2] with fingerprint:
2017 F51A 2572 0E78 8827 5329 FCFD 6305 9821 F7B2
Hyrum K. Wright [1024D/4E24517C] with fingerprint:
3324 80DA 0F8C A37D AEE6 D084 0B03 AE6E 4E24 517C
Mark Phippard [1024D/035A96A9] with fingerprint:
D315 89DB E1C1 E9BA D218 39FD 265D F8A0 035A 96A9

Release notes for the 1.6.x release series may be found at:

http://subversion.tigris.org/svn_1.6_releasenotes.html

You can find the list of changes between 1.6.6 and earlier versions at:

http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.6.6/CHANGES [Less]

StExBar 1.7.2

Posted 27 days ago by nob...@example.com (Stefan)

A new version of the StExBar has been released. Here's the change list.

Download it from the homepage.