[m-dev.] subversion 1.0 installed on ceres

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On 27-Feb-2004, Zoltan Somogyi <zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > I've installed subversion 1.0 on ceres from the source tarball if anyone
> > would like to experiment with it (you'll need to run a private svnserve
> > process until such time as we decide to have a general one running.)
> 
> The documentation is available in ~zs/papers/svnbook.html.
> 
> Based on my experiments so far, you don't need to have a private svnserve
> process if you are willing access the repository via URLs such as
> 
> 	file:///home/staff/zs/SVN

Actually, accessing the repository with file: URLs works only if the
repository is on a local, non-NFS filesystem. If it is on an NFS filesystem,
it fails with an obscure error message, and the documentation says its
behavior is effectively undefined, so the results could be a lot worse.

Since we want to keep the Mercury repository on a backed-up, RAID filesystem,
moving it to subversion would require getting the sysadmins to run a
subversion server on munginya. The fix for a failure that leaves a lock
on the repository, requires getting the sysadmins to stop this server
while the lock is being removed, which is less than convenient.

However, I have also found a couple of problems with hooks. While subversion
has pre-commit hooks, these don't seem to be powerful enough for us.
They run with the server's permissions, so they can't modify working files
to update copyright dates, and they aren't told which files changed, anyway.
Basically, the problem is that the hooks run on the server, not on
the client. svnlook does provide enough information that writing our own
client-side check for copyright dates should be simple enough,
but it doesn't look like we could use subversion to enforce their use.

Zoltan.
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