Re: subversion questions

On Nov 1, 2011, at 05:24, Nrupen Kantamneni wrote:

> 1. Can we have revision control via web browser based ? If yes can you provide me the settings

What functions do you want to make available via the web?

Out of the box, if you serve your repository with Apache, you get a web-based view of the files and directories in your repository, including past revisions if you know what URL parameters to append. You can customize the appearance of directory listings using an XSLT stylesheet.

If you install third-party web-based Subversion repository viewers like Trac, WebSVN or ViewVC, you get a prettier view, including additional functions like examining log messages and diffs, and then it doesn't matters how your repository is served (i.e. it no longer needs to be served by Apache; it could be served by svnserve).

There are also third-party web-based Subversion administrative programs like SVNManager that let you create users and repositories.

I'm not aware of any web-based interfaces for modifying the contents of a repository, such as creating, editing, renaming, moving or deleting files or directories. Typically you want to make changes in a working copy so that you can test your changes before committing them.

> 2. Does SVN support hot swap replication (meaning the data is continuously backed up on a different machine and if the original server goes down the secondary immediately start serving as master)

You can create replica servers using svnsync. These can be used purely as offline backups, or can be made available online and used simultaneously, as long as they are configured to be read-only. You may only commit changes to the master repository, but you can configure the slave repositories to automatically proxy write requests back to the master. If the master fails, manual intervention is necessary to promote one of the slaves to be the new master. Or if the failure of the master is temporary and having only read access temporarily is acceptable, you can just bring the master back up when you can, and let users read from one of the slaves until then. Users do however need to specifically select which server they want to connect to (whether the master or a specific slave), so regardless of their choice, if that particular server is down, those users will have to "svn relocate" their working copies to another server if they need access to the repository during the time that server is down.
Received on 2011-11-01 13:18:56 CET