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Monday, August 02, 2010

What is CollabNet Subversion Edge?

What is CollabNet Subversion Edge? It is beta software. I watched some nice video presentations, and was very excited to try it out. Well it does not offer support in beta on Mac OS X. It does offer support for Windows... figures. I would like to see support for Mac OS X. Linux support is awesome, but there is that other 1/3 of the current computer market that uses Macs.
Subversion project visualization image.Image via Wikipedia

After my complaints about Mac Support, I am not sold on their concept. It looks like a nice convenience, but most of the admins I know are competent enough to set up Subversion, and ViewVC on their own. The other items like LDAP support seem like nice value add items. I am not sure that I want a black box which does updates running Apache in my domain. I like to know how it is configured, and that the security is set correctly. I don't want to have to worry that modifying it will break it. That is just me.
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6 comments:

  1. Mark Phippard03 August, 2010 08:41

    We do intend to support OSX eventually. In our experience supporting Subversion users, we find the overwhelming majority of users on OSX are using it as a client OS and not running a Subversion server. So it was not as critical (to us) to support it as a server before say Windows.

    In terms of the Apache configuration, you still have access to the configuration files that are generated and you can even edit the httpd.conf if needed. Subversion Edge is focused on providing a "Subversion Server" and it optimizes the Apache configuration accordingly. We recommend using a separate Apache instance for running other applications.

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  2. John Yeary03 August, 2010 09:58

    That is a nice follow-up. I can understand your targeting Linux since you are correct about the majority of users would be using the client side application. However, my experience is that Windows users are doing the same thing.

    I am not sure that I would be comfortable depending on a Windows server instance to support my Subversion repository. This may be based on my Linux/Unix/BSD/Mac OS X experiences. I may be slightly jaded on this.

    Does the configuration allow you to lock it down, and still maintain functionality? For example, are most of the modules disabled?

    Is there any one thing which, if modified in the configuration, may cause it not to function and update?

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  3. Mark Phippard03 August, 2010 12:41

    Windows server is our largest download by a mile, so we had to go off that statistic.

    We write a default httpd.conf for your OS and then use various Include statements to pull in the generated files for the various configuration operations you specify in the web UI. Once httpd.conf exists, we never touch it again, so you are free to hack it however you need (and take on responsibility for it working). You can still use our Includes if they work for you, in which case you can also still benefit from the configuration UI.

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  4. John Yeary03 August, 2010 15:43

    Windows is the largest download! I guess statistically they are the largest install base of OSes. So even if it was 1% of 10,000,000 it would be 100,000.

    I don't think I would personally change the configuration unless it was loading modules which are unused, or any wide open parameters. Very nice work. I will look forward to examining it once it is available for the Mac.

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  5. Anonymous04 June, 2011 16:45

    John - give uberSVN http://www.uberSVN.com a try - we are planning OS X support later this year...

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  6. John Yeary05 June, 2011 07:51

    I examined UberSVN after Elaine posted a comment. Again... it looks good, but without OS X support, I can not comment on how easy it is to use, or maintain. I have no interest in trying it on other platforms.

    Thanks for the link though.

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