Pervasive Code » Subversion

Subversion 1.5 will include merge tracking

Jamie Flournoy — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 16:30:10 +0000

Despite Linus’ strident criticism of Subversion (in the 70 minute video he accuses Subversion, and then anybody who wrote it, and then anybody who likes it, of being ugly and stupid) I still use Subversion and I like it. Clearly compared to Linus I am ugly and stupid. OK fine. But I’m not switching to git now because my tiny teams have been fine with Subversion. Maybe later I’ll give git a whirl.

Nevertheless, the ugliest-stupidest part of using Subversion in my experience is merging – specifically, repeated merging. It takes caution on the part of the person doing the merge to avoid re-merging the same changes, which sucks. Imagine everybody you’re developing with, including yourself when you’re on the phone and trying to wrap up some changes before running out the door for whatever reason, and you’ll realize that having a tool that can rapidly shoot you in the foot in a way that may take hours to unwind, but more importantly, days to recognize and identify, is scary. (Consider that old, replaced code, and the old tests that go with it, might be put back into your current source tree, and your automated tests would be happy since they all got merged back in as one big lump. You’d have to look for specific changes and features you had made in order to notice that they had regressed back to an earlier version without you meaning to do that. Eek!)

Well, they’re fixing it. I dunno if it’s gonna be perfect, but at least they’re addressing the problem and seem to understand what the needs of the masses are. So I’m optimistic.

And yeah, at some point I’ll probably check out Git. But not until Subversion irritates me more than it does today. :)

Ubuntu Linux 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” upgrade report

Jamie Flournoy — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:08:30 +0000

7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04″, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03″) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump.

I had a few packages installed from the Feisty Fawn universe and multiverse repositories (wordpress, clamav) on top of my Edgy Eft installation, and the mixed version setup worked well. Clamav was updated to depend on a library (libc, I think) that was not available in Edgy Eft, and Apt was smart enough to just leave clamav at the existing version. Also, I had made quite a few local customizations to configuration files for dovecot imapd (enabling non-secure IMAP connectons since they only happen over my home LAN), /etc/services (adding VMWare’s admin service and a second Subversion repository), and a couple of others.

I started by changing ‘edgy’ to ‘feisty’ in /etc/apt/sources.list, clearing out the old CD-ROM source line (from my original installation from ISO images) and duplicate universe and multiverse lines (from my mixed installation).

I then did apt-get update, and apt-get -d dist-upgrade (-d means download but don’t install) and let that run (300+ MB of stuff to download, might as well let it run while I sleep).

This morning I ran apt-get dist-upgrade and babysat it. There were a couple of things that it said it would uninstall that I had to reinstall: libapache2-mod-python (needed by Trac), ruby18-elisp (not automatically upgraded to ruby19-elisp, but that was easy to manually install), and libnet-perl, which appears to be broken currently. That last one would seem to be the first of two genuinely broken things in this upgrade, though I can’t think of anything I use that depends on it.

There were a half dozen or so manual config file merges that I had to do; I wish one of the options were to attempt an automatic merge of the existing, customized version and the new, vanilla version. Nothing I changed really required manual intervention; all I did was what patch could have done just as easily. Tedious, but not really a problem. This effort probably added 5 minutes total.

After all that, it rebooted cleanly but Trac doesn’t work anymore. Apparently Trac depends on Clearsilver which reportedly is an antique and obsolete template system that isn’t currently built for Python 2.5, which is part of ubuntu-minimal on Feisty. I have a lead on fixing this manually but I haven’t done it yet. I expect this to be fixed for me in an official package in the next week or less; several folks know about it and say the fix is percolating through the package system already. So I might not bother with the manual fix.

The reboot went fine. I then updated VMware Server, which required a bit of manual assistance, but then it always does. Here’s what I did: VMWare Server in Feisty.

I haven’t upgraded my VPS yet but I’ll do that soon. I want to check with my VPS hosting support folks first to see if they know of any gotchas.

OmniGraffle Pro and Subversion

Jamie Flournoy — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 22:04:17 +0000

I’m working on wireframes for a startup company, and I’m using the excellent OmniGraffle Pro to do it. Of course I’m keeping all my artifacts in Subversion. But there’s a problem: OmniGraffle sometimes changes a file’s format from a single flat file to a “bundle”, which is a directory that Mac OS X pretends is a single entity (as is seen with all the .app bundles in the /Applications directory). OmniGraffle bundles contain a file with a hideously awful filename, which I’ve seen in the old Classic MacOS if I remember correctly: Icon^M. Like, 5 characters, 5th is a carriage return. Subversion can’t check it in, svn:ignore can’t ignore it. Ugh. Here’s the fix: Using OmniGraffle with Subversion without Sadness