Seeking good web sites for Debian tools

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,

> We recently considered switching to svn from CVS at work.  For a while
> I was the main proponent of a switch.  The matter dropped when I
> admitted that even I was scared of reports of database corruption.
> They are fairly easy to find in Google.  Can you comment on those?
> Did it happen to you?  More than once?  Often?

The only problem I had with svn was in a queer setup...
I tried running a subversion repository on the computer pool at my
university. Just for myself, in my home directory.
Well, the home directories are stored on NFS, both server and clients
are Linux (the server are Debian I've heard, the clients are heavily
modified SuSE boxes - most of the software has been replaced by newer
versions via NFS, I believe). They clients are also are SELinux enabled.

People tended to use host names for SSH, like rose.pool.domain.tld
This resulted in certain machines being heavily loaded, whereas machines
people couldn't remember the names or that were in the back part of the
rooms were mostly unused.
To remedy that, SSH access is blocked from outside, but there is a load
balancing pool which you can reach by a RRD DNS entry which will usually
direct you to a low load machine. I don't like that setup, but its
working okay.

Well, this setup broke my subversion repository - it got locked by my
commit, but I think I interrupted the commit somehow... well, the
repository was locked, but I couldn't even find out on which machine...
Some days later, I got notified by the pool admins that they killed my
svnserve process, actually "warning" me, that we are not allowed to run
"public services" on pool computers. :-)

I don't really blame subversion for that, but more the weird setup in
the pool as well as NFS locking.

> BTW, what's this about kernel not being able to use BK?  Has Larry
> made an unreasonable demand?  That would be a shame, he seemed to
> be mellowing recently.

The "free beer" version of the bitkeeper client is discontinued. The
opensource version is read-only. Although especially Linus and the other
kernel developers would probably still get free licences, they are not
happy with this, so they are looking for alternatives.

Actually Linus himself has written a small alternative with some
interesting features, including the "signing" of patches.

He also sent out a mail basically saying: leave me alone this weekend,
while I'm looking at SCMs, and don't recommend SVN to me, I have already
discovered it, and I also know of arch, bazaar-ng, arch, darcs.

Best check out the coverage on LWN.

Greetings,
Erich