use Perl

[This is a repost from here.]

You’re probably aware of Google’s code hosting service. They use Subversion as their revision control system, so if you want to contribute to a project hosted there you really need a Subversion client.

I was reading the FAQ for the hosting service the other day and a particular entry struck me.

Do you have support for ViewVC or similar repository-browsing tools?

This feature isn’t implemented yet, but you can still browse the latest version of your project’s code by entering the repository URL into a web browser.

Since SVN::Web now supports (well, it does on my development site, which will be released as 0.50 real soon now) accessing remote repositories, it should be pretty easy to have it talk to the repositories hosted at Google.

A minor wrinkle is that SVN::Web expects to be configured with a list of available repositories. But that’s only a small code change to solve. So I’ve done that, and put together a proof-of-concept SVN::Web installation.

The practical upshot of which is that if you have a project at Google Code Hosting, you can take this URL: http://jc.ngo.org.uk:81/svnweb/, append the name of your project, and get a decent web interface on to your repository.

For example, the Reconstructor project (chosen at random) gets this URL: http://jc.ngo.org.uk:81/svnweb/reconstructor.

This is very definitely a proof of concept, and may well disappear if it gets completely hammered, and/or starts sucking up all my hosted bandwidth.

I'm considering writing Plagger::Plugin::Publish::Blogger, using Net::Blogger to publish journal entries found by Plagger to blogs that Net::Blogger supports -- which includes Slashcode journals.

If possible, I'd like to avoid having to install a complete copy of Slash to test this.

Does anyone know of any existing test/scratch Slashcode installations on the 'net that support this?

From perlop

Binary ".." is the range operator, which is really two different operators depending on the context. In list context, it returns a list of values counting (up by ones) from the left value to the right value. If the left value is greater than the right value then it returns the empty list.

(emphasis added). So:

@a = (1 .. 3); # @a = (1, 2, 3)
@b = (3 .. 1); # @b = (), *not* @b = (3, 2, 1)
@c = reverse (1 ..3); # @c = (3, 2, 1)

Why is this? I had occasion to do this the other day, and my first cut at the code did the equivalent of @b above, instead of @c, which led to a few moments headscratching.

It struck me as odd that Perl, which so often DWIMs, gets it wrong here.

I'm > this close to releasing SVN::Web 0.50. There are several major
changes in this version, the most dramatic of which is that SVN::Web now
supports accessing remote repositories.

In other words, you can have something like this in your config.yaml:

    repos:
        local_repo: file:///path/to/repo
        some_repo: svn://host/path/to/repo
        other_repo: http://host/path/to/repo

and it'll work. The work to do this has also meant that the Diff and
Revision operations are considerably faster and more memory efficient. Also, SVN::Web::Blame is now implemented, which I know some people have been
waiting for.

If you'd like to try out 0.50, fetch the code from:

      svn://jc.ngo.org.uk/nik/CPAN/SVN-Web/branches/svn-client/

and run:

% perldoc CHANGES.pod
% perldoc UPGRADING.pod
% perl Build.PL
% ./Build
% ./Build test
% ./Build install --install_base /some/path

(use the --install_base option if you don't want to overwrite a pre-existing
SVN::Web installation)

Feedback welcomed.

Rar. Details are here. One of the things I plan on working on is Perl + DTrace.

As an aside, I'm experimenting with what I'm calling a "Personal Planet" (no idea if that's already been coined, it just came to me). Having heard numerous people rave about Plagger I've set up an installation to aggregate feeds from the various places that I might publish content. Here, the previously linked blog, RSS feeds of commits to my Subversion repo, etc. You can see the result here. Since this post is going to be included in that feed it's all going to feel a bit meta.