davidb dives in

As I move my current project over to subversion, I’m getting a better feel for what subversion is really like to live with. I just started, so I don’t really have a solid impression yet. I do have some not-so-solid impressions, however:

1. On the command line, I still instinctively type “cvs” instead of “svn”.
2. When I type the right thing, the command line is nicer than CVS. The existence of svn status and svn revert is what I like so far.
3. Subclipse isn’t really all there yet.

Now, when I said before that I got Subclipse working, I wasn’t lying. But, my main motivation for getting it to work at all was to use Eclipse’s “Synchronize with Repository” command. That feature of Subclipse, it appears, is not fully baked. When you try it, all sorts of relatively bizarre behavior manifests itself.

You can still browse repositories, commit changes, modify properties, and the like, which is actually still pretty cool.

I’ve been moving my small work group from CVS to Subversion. Not that we make huge demands on our CM system, but Subversion is an obvious step up.

Server Problems

My first real attempt (beyond just skimming the subversion book and installing an internal test system that I only let live for a few days) was to install version 1.0.8 on our group’s web server box, running Fedora Core 2. This was a pretty easy install as FC2 comes with an rpm for subversion 1.0.8. It is practically done for you. You just need to decide on a repository strategy and a backup plan. It all went swimmingly well until we started to tentatively use it. At that point, I discovered that the Berkeley DB database it was using got corrupted at the drop of a hat. This was bizarre, and I still don’t know what the issue was. We spent about a day searching the Internet for others experiencing the same problem. Nothing. Not being willing to seriously debug this issue, I backed off for a bit. A few weeks ago, I tried again, this time with version 1.1.0-rc4 and the FSFS filesystem, instead of BDB. A few cvs2svn runs later, I was comfortable that this install of subversion was stable and fine.

Enter Subclipse

I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE for my Java development for a few months now, and I had gotten somewhat used to using it for some of the CVS management of my projects. (This after 10 years or so of using the command line for all CVS work). Of course, there exists a plugin for Eclipse for working with subversion, Subclipse.

And, of course, once I got the latest version of this plugin (0.9.22 or 21), I couldn’t get it to work. Not on linux (my normal development platform), nor Mac OS X, my teammates main platform (and probably my future development platform).

The problem was, essentially, that Subclipse uses javahl, a JNI interface to the C subversion client libraries, and it was missing or mismatched on both platforms.

Linux

On my Linux workstation, the first problem was that javahl wasn’t built or installed with the subversion RPMs. I had already been hacking an existing subversion RPM to be a 1.1.0 RPM, and just had to modify it further to actually build the javahl stuff, and then put it in a separate RPM. That took a few hours. Then I had to come to the slow realization that the patches from my original RPM were causing the javahl stuff to not link correctly. Then I had to realize that my eclipse installation wasn’t finding the shared library (I solved that by creating a shell script to put /usr/lib in LD_LIBRARY_PATH before launching Eclipse).

Note that on Linux, before I got the javahl stuff to work, it would use the subversion command line tools, but this produced irritating error dialogs all the time. It just wasn’t the smoothest solution out there.

Mac OS X

(I’ve been using the subversion package from metissian.com for Mac OS X. I like fink, but this was so much easier)

When I first tried Subclipse on Mac OS X, it just caused the JVM to die. Later, after the latest Java 1.4.2 update, it just didn’t work. This was a similar issue: console would spew forth error messages that I could tell immediately were because there was a mismatch between the installed javahl stuff and Subclipse (no problems loading the shared lib on this platform, the metissian package puts the shared lib in a valid spot). After struggling with this for a day, just updating to the 1.1.0 version of the package solved everything.

The Future

In the future, I’m hoping that Subclipse switches to a native Java subversion library, which will hopefully make Subclipse always work right out of the box.

What it isn’t is a place for me to blather on about my personal life. You aren’t going to be subjected to pictures of my cats, or tales from my last date, or rants about How I’m Feeling. (In all fairness, I don’t have any cats). It also isn’t going to be a place for me to rant on my political beliefs, although I may comment on things political.

What it is is a place for me to ramble on about various thoughts that I have from time to time, and for me to rant about various technical issues that I think about (largely due to my day job).

In general, though, I do not plan to post random bits without commentary. Or really anything without some form of commentary. However, we’ll see if I can keep that up.

Two developments.

1. I’ve discovered that you can post to WordPress without publishing. You know, drafts, and private blog posts. Neat.
2. While MarsEdit cannot preview using Markdown, ecto can!

Not that you really need an external posting tool with WordPress. The web form is perfectly fine, although I currently don’t have spellchecking working. I’m guessing that the php installation that comes with RedHat 9.0 doesn’t have pspell support compiled in. Or I maybe doing something else wrong.

So far, WordPress is looking pretty good.

Markdown

After getting this blog up and running, I immediately enabled the Markdown plugin.

It works! Except — it doesn’t work everywhere. For instance, not in the RSS feed or in trackbacks (apparently). Unlike how I expect blojsom does this (take your Markdown post, run it through the perl filter, and save the result as the entry), WordPress with the Markdown plugin actually saves the entry in Markdown format.

Which is a good thing, really.

It is lovely to be able to edit the post in Markdown format rather than html. But it really ought to be html everywhere else. Particularly in the RSS feed.

Update: Some fiddling and switching to a full content RSS feed has fixed the formatting issue for the RSS feed, at least. See http://wordpress.org/support/10/5493 for the gist of this.

MarsEdit

Even though you cannot get MarsEdit to autodetect anything, you can get it to work. You can get it to work well (although I haven’t tested this much) by patching WordPress’s xmlrpc.php file.

I don’t think that you can get MarsEdit to preview using Markdown, however, so it is sort of difficult to tell if you’ve done something wrong until you’ve actually posted.

Update: a little bit more experimentation has shown that WP’s solution of storing the comments in original Markdown format has a downside: if you are ever tempted to turn the Markdown plugin off, you will have to go back an reformat all of your previous posts.

A newly born babe to the world of Blogging…

For no good reason, I have created a blog. To be a contrarian, I have used wordpress, not blojsom (which is already installed somewhere on this host).

We shall see how it works out.