Ubuntu’s Subversion
I’ve a minor gripe about Ubuntu - only ‘cos it’s caught me out a couple of times.
My local dev server is runnung Unbuntu Gutsy, and I do run apt-get upgrade etc. every now and then to keep things current.
I tend to keep most of the sites I’m working on checked out out of the repository somewhere that Apache can get to them so I can see the rendered output easily, and to make life easier I also access the server’s webroot over an SMB share from my laptop.
Life was great until I upgraded my laptop’s TortoiseSVN to 1.5.0-something-or-other as it keeps nagging to do - but if I’m careless enough to do an update on a remote working copy using Tortoise, it upgrades it to the new 1.5 format, which means it can’t be used by subversion on the boxes own command line as the Gutsy Subversion package is not up to 1.5 yet.
Twice now I’ve had to check out a fresh working copy to overcome this problem, and to save any future accidents, I’m downgrading my Tortoise to a pre-1.5 version - I looked at trying to get an ‘experimental’ Debian package installed but it looked far too risky.
SVN has been annoying me recently. Moblog v2 has so many files, that pushing updates out to it can effectively take down the site as SVN eats all the cpu/disk I/O during it’s update.
I always liked darcs, myself, but apparently it’s on it’s way out due to lack of Haskell programmers staying interested. I know quite a few people who swear by Mercurial though.
Comment by mat — July 31, 2008 @ 12:34 pm
I’ve been coming to the conclusion that if you can’t break a site into chunks and manage sections independently, then perhaps it’s time to have clustered servers that you can take one down at a time to update without live traffic.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Git, but hell, the problems I have with svn I’m sure aren’t the tool’s fault but just that the challenge of managing codebases like this is not a small one.
Comment by jaydublu — July 31, 2008 @ 1:14 pm