Older blog entries for gstein (starting at number 75)

jmg:
Just a few hilites, as this isn't a good mechanism for discussion, and I'm not interested in being defensive.

DAV is an HTTP extension. That means that it is HTTP at heart, with some new methods, headers, etc. Since is uses HTTP, it can use all of the authentication mechanisms available to HTTP. This can be as simple as Basic or Digest auth, or as complicated as client-side certificates, NTLM, or Kerberos. Encryption is handled using SSL. ACLs are handled as part of standard HTTP authorization mechanisms.

Yes, I read your design document, but it felt more like a wish list or a requirements doc than a design.

The SVN design document was written entirely before implementation began. It is actually quite a bit out of date :-). Ben did some work a couple weeks ago to update a few of the more egregious errors.

Inter-repository communication (and replicated or distributed repositories) are going to happen after the 1.0 release. We want something that can be used sooner rather than later; something that is at least as capable as CVS and can fulfill all the roles where CVS is used today.

And are we doing something new? Yup :-) We're building a version control system that kicks butt. Sure, maybe some commercial packages such as P4 or ClearCase have done this before. But they haven't released it as Open Source. Now that is something new, and quite cool.

Umm... jmg, where the heck are you coming from when you say that Subversion (SVN) "just fixes misfeatures of CVS instead of actually being a 21st [century] ... source control program" ? Ahem.

SVN has a multithreaded, robust, high performance repository based on the latest Berkeley DB (the same core used by the next rev of MySQL). The network server is Apache 2.0, providing one of the most tuned and portable network servers on the planet. The wire protocol is WebDAV, and more specifically, DeltaV. WebDAV is definitely a new, modern, and robust wire protocol (spec'd by RFC 2518); especially designed for document management and version control systems. The client side is a well-designed set of library modules, with a thin command-line client on the front. The libraries will allow for easier implementation of scripting frontends, graphic clients, and other embedded systems.

Just what part is not a modern version control system?

(and I'm not even going to get into the capabilities of the repository compared to CVS, and how the SVN repository easily fixes and handles all the things we hate about CVS)

(oh, and I'll be polite and not comment on your "design doc", but will just compare your page against the couple dozen pages of the SVN design doc)

Well, writing the code for DAV dead property support for SVN was cake. I figure getting drunk next time will make it more challenging. :-) ... Still have the live properties to deal with, though. At that point, I'll have a real DAV server against the SVN backend. It won't be a versioning server, but it will support the DAV clients out there.

I'm thinking to do the live props, then work on some client- related work. I'm unable to test the server until the backend is completed. While there is an API that I can code to, it isn't quite there yet, and it is subject to change. Not to mention there isn't a way to create and fill a repository yet. Ah well. While the server can idle in a somewhat untested state, I can begin the client work to issue a bunch of commands against the server to do an "update" or a "commit". The checkout is pretty well handled already -- it actually works against just about any DAV server since it just fetches files recursively. Of course, it will get trickier in the future when we want to fetch a specific revision or tag.

Hrm. Checking out the java.apache.org pages. Gonna go in there and make it refer to the jakarta.apache.org pages better. The java site is just too separate, and doesn't acknowledge the fact that the real work is over in the jakarta world. Of course, this peeves me greatly because I have nothing to do with Java. This is just cleanup after the Java boys who don't want to take the time to merge the two sites. Instead, they just keep tramping along with two sites. Boneheads.

Watched Titan AE tonite. Damn. A lot better than I had expected. Excellent graphics, pace, sound, etc. It really flowed, and the eye candy was awesome. Parts reminded me of Heavy Metal, the way that animation plus great backgrounds were done. But in Titan, they mixed animation, CGI, and regular cel work together into a great action movie. I'd recommend watching it. Definitely. Oh, and get yourself a subwoofer. Hoo!

Tomorrow is dinner up in the city somewhere. Dunno where... that is still pending. Tonite was a good dinner at home.

Urk. Damn CVS checkout is still going. I'm guessing the pdf that it is working on is some monster of a file, and it is just taking its sweet time to shove that over my downsized pipe. Fuck PacBell. Oh, but that's another story.

Spoke on the phone today with jimb about Subversion's "filesystem" interface. We're all sync'd up, and he'll get cranking on the updated design this weekend.

Lately, I've been spending some time dealing with the move to split APR out of Apache 2.0. It is moving smoothly, and we'll do the split in a week.

This past weekend, I was in New Orleans for a bachelor party. Oy. Talk about a lot of good drink, good food, and a ton of fun. Las Vegas is still a great place, but you can't walk the streets in Vegas with drinks in your hand. Big drinks. They both have food, drinks, strip clubs, and gambling. Apparently, New Orleans finally came to grips with the farce of riverboat gambling and allowed a Harrah's to install a casino "on land". (I hear it is losing money, though) New Orleans doesn't have the shows that Vegas has, though. Last time we were in Vegas (back in April), we went to see Mystere, a Cirque du Soleil show. It is a great show. "O" is another CdS show, at the Bellagio (Mystere is at Treasure Island). So, Vegas is probably a bit more fun because of that, because of all the big-ass hotels and sights, and there is much more variety in gambling. Although N.O. wasn't bad in that department: sat down with $100 and walked away with $209 about 45 minutes later (the $1 was a tip for the drink; I count drinks by watching those dollars; last time in Vegas when I was down $14 in dollar chips, I knew it was time to quit :-)

So... survived that, and have been trying to catch up on email. That always sucks. It seems that I can never quite do it. Ah well.

Before going to Vegas, I started working on the new "walker" concept for mod_dav. Cleaned it up drastically, and revised how mod_dav_fs does its walking. I realized that a lot of the walker design was based on some internal needs to mod_dav_fs, so there were some excellent simplifications in the public interface. This will make creating a walker for SVN much easier. (and I started on that before leaving)

Today, I'm busy reviewing a huge patch from John Vasta for the mod_dav in Apache 2.0. John works at Rational and he uses ClearCase for managing all of these projects. I tell you, that software must kick ass for comparing projects and merging changes back and forth. He took all his work against mod_dav 1.1 and forward-ported it to Apache 2.0. Didn't miss a beat, and produced a winner patch. I just committed the thing straight in, and will make extra little tweaks if needed. But this provides a great basis for building the versioning pieces for SVN. It is missing activity support, but no problem... I can easily handle that portion (and John will back-port to mod_dav 1.1).

Coming up will be continuing to flesh out mod_dav_svn in the Subversion project. I need to add the walker, add properties (live and dead), and then begin the versioning stuff. Once I get a server built, then I can drive it with some Python scripts. When it seems fine, then it will be time to do the client-side of the connection (libsvn_ra_dav).

Thanksgiving is coming up next week. Going to have four people over (six of us total). Should be great fun, and we're hoping to have our new dining room table and chairs here. The table sits six easy, but can go to ten with the extensions. (it would be great to "go to eleven", but that doesn't work well for a table)

Hoo boy. Lots of stuff since the last diary entry. ... two week vacation to Australia for the Olympics and the wine country ... a week off to London for ApacheCon ... some SVN hacking ... Apache hacking ... dealing with my DSL going out ... etc

Well, SVN passed Milestone 1. M2 is basically the same feature set, but over the network. Since I'm the network guy, that means I have a good chunk of work to do. Due on December 1. Should be doable.

Apache is breaking the APR project out. That will be cool. Subversion is using it, and I can easily see a lot of other apps having a need for it. Making it independent of the web server will make it a lot more attractive and approachable to others.

Well, that is it for now. More soon... honest :-)

Been doing a bunch of work on Subversion and Apache... getting the server side of SVN into gear. It is going okay, but the amount of work seems to be a bit larger than I had thought. No real problems that I foresee, but it won't be something banged out in a night.

Busy week with friends in town, and going out to do things. My friend Sergei came last weekend, then John Viega came by a couple nights early in the week, then our friend Z (aka Diane) came over Friday and she and Anni went for a Girl's Night Out (I stayed home and hacked on SVN), then Saturday was the Palo Alto Black and White Ball (very fun), then a brunch this morning (six of us), followed by Sergei dropping by again (motoring home this time, after a Disneyland trip). A few more days, and I'll off on vacation myself...

Gotta get my ApacheCon materials in today. I'll also be speaking at XML DevCon, but those materials have a bit more time. I'll be doing a bit more SVN hacking before taking off, but I also have some home networking issues to deal with before then (sigh), so I dunno how much SVN work will get done.

Off to sleep...

Got a bunch of Subversion (SVN) coding done. The client side now uses Neon to traverse an SVN server (just a DAV server at the moment) and fetch the most recent version. There is definitely more work to do, but having it grab the stuff is a big step.

The SVN client uses the excellent Neon library for all of its HTTP operation. Neon is a great library if you need to do any client-side HTTP code (from C). I built the SVN client stuff in just a few hours -- the HTTP stuff was brain-dead simple. Thanx Joe!

Been watching a ton of Dragonball Z lately. While we've had somebody here doing wallpaper, I've been in the family room (rather than down in my office in the basement). Well... what else to do? Turn on the TV to the Cartoon Network, watch cartoons, and hack on the laptop. DBZ comes on for an hour each day... over the past week, I've watched quite a bit and have been getting into it. Gundam Wing is just a big question mark -- it is hard to figure out what is really going on there. Sailor Moon is just dumb. Ooh! Johnny Bravo is on now... woo.

Lessee... since last month. Not a whole lot going on because of a ton of travel. Went to Monterey to speak at the O'Reilly conference, went to Hawaii for vacation and a wedding, then to Tahoe for a b-day party, off to Sonoma for a wedding, then finally to Seattle for biz with XMLFund. Oy... so distracting.

In between all of that, I got my WebDAV/Subversion integration design completed (and checked into Subversion's CVS). It's coding time now.

Finally got some filtering stuff into Apache (we had a big pow-wow a few weeks ago; Ryan checked in the design output of that meeting). There are some small issues with it, but the stuff is moving forward quite fine now.

I banged out a ViewCVS release, but it didn't have any of the new features that I wanted (too rushed); no edna release either :-( ... sigh.

Completed the DAV integration, including APR-ization and the config/build stuff. The big spot was ripping out the old crap of a dynamic-load plugin system. It was a hellish design that really didn't turn out in a way I liked. Luckily, it is much easier to simply use true Apache modules as the plugins. With the hook system in Apache 2.0, it made this total cake. So there is now a core DAV module plus a default "filesystem" module which provides a filesystem-based backend for the DAV functionality. This structure now allows new backends. There are several out there, but all proprietary :-( ... Brendan Quinn started one for MySQL. I'm going to code one to use Subversion for a back-end.

I've also been doing quite a bit of Subversion work. Mostly email jockeying (about the design), but also digging into some issues with its use of APR.

Been trying to clear my dev plate of some stuff so that I can turn back to some Python coding. My new httplib and imputil modules are in Python now, but there is some remaining work items plus doc'ing that I need to do. I gotta get the DAV and SVN to a state where I can ignore it for a week and turn to the Python stuff. Then I want to get an edna and ViewCVS releases out the door. Then back to Apache 2.0 and Subversion. Whew!

I'm speaking at the O'Reilly Conference this-coming week. You may also be able to find me hanging around the ActiveState booth (I work as a Technical Advisor for them), and especially at the ActiveState parties :-)

My talk for ApacheCon Europe was accepted, and my session will be a comfy two hours this time. I had an hour and a half at the last ApacheCon and that always feels too short. It also looks like I'll be talking at XML DevCon in November about the WebDAV stuff.

Been working on integrating mod_dav into Apache 2.0. Also been doing some filtered I/O for Apache, along with some other nits.

Had a good trip to Napa for several days. Came back with buttloads of wine. Oy. What a dangerous place.

Pool is coming along... just waiting for the tile guy now.

This and that. I'll write some more techy stuff in a while...