Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

CVS for non-programmers 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.

  • CVS for nonprogrammers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by da (1525) on 2003.02.04 14:40 (#16708) Homepage Journal
    Sometimes I think O'Reilly really should have published an entire CVS book, not just a pocket reference, which does the neophyte user little good for understanding the concepts. Unfortunately I haven't seen a book or FAQ that would really help in this situation. I'd love to know of one.

    I was working on a project for a graphic design firm that wanted a revision control system, but they and their clients did not want to change their current behaviors.

    What we settled on was a WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) folder their Windows machines could connect to. DAV would transparently handle concurrency/locking. My code transparently made backups of everything they saved. The clients didn't really care about version comments or merging files together.

    Behind the scenes the WebDAV stuff worked on an Apache server with custom mod_perl handlers to talk to an Oracle database to store revision info. The backup files were simply numbered .gz copies in a mirrored directory structure on the DAV folder. It met the clients' needs and it worked pretty nicely, too. If you'd like more info about this, I'd be happy to provide it.

    Perhaps you should stage a few disaster situations for your graphic guy to recover from- such as editing a file while he's editing it and overwriting his changes. Nothing teaches like real-world experience. Or, since you like the guy, just demonstrate how smoothly and efficiently things can work with CVS in place- version logs, etc... :-)

    --

    -DA [coder.com]

    • if you want autoversion'd WebDAV without having to write a custom backend, Subversion [tigris.org] can do that, although you have to use a bleeding edge version of apache, and the support is still a bit flakey (as our WebDAV/DeltaV support is currently limited to pretty much 'what we need to make svn work'). some people have reported success with it though. see here [collab.net] for some details.
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.