Planet Subversion

If you are running an Apache based Subversion server there are several options available for Subversion Authz:

What is Subversion Authz?

“Authz” is simply jargon that is short for

Dates for the 2010 Atlassian Summit have now been confirmed as follows:

Wednesday, June 09, 2010 at 8:00 AM - Friday, June 11, 2010 at 6:00 PM (PT) at the

HgEclipse is a plugin providing support for the highly popular Mercurial distributed version control system within the Eclipse IDE. The Release Candidate of HgEclipse 1.5.0 has been available since November

Clearvision have today added a new product to their range of integration tools which enable customers to fully bi-directionally integrate multi-product Software Change and Configuration Management environments using Open Source

If you are a Git user, especially those with experience of Subversion (SVN), you should seriously consider downloading TortoiseGit 1.3.2:
http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/downloads/list

TortoiseGit is a port of

Jack and I had great success with our first text adventure game, Rover’s Day Out. It won first place in the 2009 Interactive Fiction Competition last November. I figured we were done for a while; after 5 months of furious coding and testing, we could take a break and start brainstorming up a sequel for next summer.

But no, Jack found us another competition to get into. Just before the new year, he insisted we get going on a “one room escape-themed” game for the Casual Gameplay IF Competition. But it was due January 31st! Could we scrape together a one-room game in only 5 weeks?

Answer: yes we could, and did. But it was a bit nuts.

We spent the first week arguing about the plot and puzzles, over videoconference and in shared notes. We spent the second week actually writing the “finished transcript” that represented the final game we wanted. Jack very cleverly solicited writing feedback from at least six peers in the IF community; at least two or three were folks that hated our first game, so it gave us some great perspective on our writing style and sense of humor. For the third week: code, code, code, day and night. We then spent the last two weeks fixing bugs from beta-testers. In other words, it was the same basic development strategy we did for our first game, just compressed down to 1/5th the time.

So without further ado, head over to the Hoosegow Game Site to try out our game! This game is much smaller and quicker than Rover; it’s designed to be played in a single lunch break, rather than over many hours. We did this because the game is going to played and judged by a much more casual gameplaying audience who aren’t as familiar with the text adventure genre. We also did some old-school things, like award points for solving puzzles.

If you’d like to judge the competition, take a look at the main competition link above. You need to play at least 5 competition games for your scores to count.

Let us know how you like it!

On 21st January 2010 the latest Subversion 1.6 patch was release – version 1.6.9

Subversion 1.6.9 is primarily a bug fix release, fixes include:

• Support for Berkeley DB 4.8.

CB2GIT will provide bi-directional integration between Intland CodeBeamer and Open Source Git, building on the existing Git integration for CodeBeamer and extending it by enforcing process and minimising

A new version of the CommitMonitor is available.

If you're interested on what's new and/or what has been changed/fixed, have a look at our issue tracker.

You can download the new version from here.

Today marks the ninth anniversary of my first commit to Subversion. Back then, the project was less than a year old, with folks actively coding on it for only six months so far. There was a command-line client. It could do commits and updates, but only to an XML storage format. There was no repository concept. No server to speak of. Pretty bare-bones. My first commit was a fix for some path handling issues – using the correct directory separator character on Windows platforms. Simple stuff. In retrospect, everything seemed relatively simple then. The goals were clear – to create a compelling replacement for CVS, where "compelling" meant "better, but similar enough to be easily embraced".

That was a long time ago. I've had two children since then, and one of them is already in school. "Time flies," and all that. But in software years, that was eons ago. Subversion has long since surpassed being a compelling replacement for CVS. Today, it's a compelling replacement for most things and a decent replacement for still more. Even statements like that are misleading – Subversion doesn't have to fuss as much with unseating other version control systems these days because it's become the default choice of version control for many segments of the software development market.

Unfortunately, time doesn't stop flying simply because you taste a little success. And looking backward while the world moves forward is only fun until you slam your skull into some of those harsh realities that inevitably lie in the path ahead of you. So I have a confession to make on behalf of the Subversion development community. We've been moving forward with no clear vision for some time now. This shouldn't come as any amount of surprise to my fellow developers. I'll fancy a guess that it's no surprise to many of our loyal users, either. That's not to say that we've been inactive – far from it. Our recent releases have simply been primarily focused around time-consuming features and tasks (merge tracking? a working copy library rewrite?) that are, for the most part, things we'd been hoping to get around to since our 1.0 release and just couldn't delay any further. The release process hasn't stalled. It's just been a while since we (the developers) were able to look any meaningful distance into the future, stake a claim to some set of features and enhancements that we were united in achieving, and confidently assert to our waiting consumers that, "Yes, that Thing You Wanted? You'll have it in 10 weeks' time."

There are many possible reasons for this: the easy stuff is finished, leaving only hard stuff to do; software maturity yields developer attrition; our millions of users keep us busy servicing the existing features; and so on. You might call them "excuses" if you have a particularly negative bent about you. You could call them "par for the course" if you've ever worked on the same software for a long period of time. I'm choosing to call them "motivation".

This year I and my CollabNet peers will be trying to address Subversion's lack of vision. Now obviously, we can't do this ourselves – even in its CollabNet-bolstered infancy, Subversion was a true open source project, governed internally and driven only as far and as fast as its individual human contributors afforded. But we can certainly strive to encourage a common interest in roadmap development amongst our peers. To that end, I've already begun working with some of my fellow developers (including our friends at WANdisco and Elego) to develop a realistic, achievable, living project roadmap for Subversion; I hope more of the Subversion workforce will be of like mind. With the project's recent move to the Apache Software Foundation, I'm optimistic – the ASF is a high-profile open source organization overflowing with talented developers who themselves are Subversion users.

Where do you fit in? Well, certainly the Subversion community wants to know what you need from Subversion. (If you've seen our issue tracker lately, you know that our users have never been shy about filing bug reports and feature requests.) But more than that, we need able programmers willing to help us chart and navigate this course. You don't have to be a stellar software developer – many of us wouldn't regard ourselves that highly, and anyway I've always found that interaction with an open-source community like this is highly conducive to improving your skill set while still serving the public need. You don't have to have oodles of free time on your hands, either – we'll take what you can give, and every little bit helps. What do you say? Visit our new "Getting Involved" web page, and learn how you can contribute to Subversion's success. Help us restore momentum and energy to Subversion.

Lately I've noticed that a lot of people ask for a feature that's already implemented in TortoiseSVN. Usually the users either request that feature or report a bug on our mailing list. But actually, there are two features that are implemented in TortoiseSVN which help users for this problem.

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Cool, I’ve now got wordpress plugins installed that not only show my recent tweets in the sidebar, but my recent flickr photos too. Try hovering the mouse over the photo!

TortoiseSVN 1.6.7 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.

A new version of grepWin is out: version 1.3.8

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

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