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.

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.

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.

###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.