[Kevin Greiner]
> We already are able to move svnserve from one server to another
> without telling end-users. We just move the service to another server
> and change the DNS entry (svn.company.com) to point to the new IP
> address.
>
> I've been attempting to follow this bonjour conversation but don't
> understand the benefits. Can you clarify?
One big point of zeroconf _in general_ is to allow random users on a
network to "browse" services available without already knowing any
hard-coded addresses. A user could fire up a svn client and hit
'browse for servers' and get a list of the 3 svnserve processes which
have helpfully been labeled 'development', 'anonsvn' and 'test-svn150'
(hey, who knows, some companies might try to _test_ a new major svn
version before rolling it out). Future directions would allow browsing
not only by the label for svnserve but by the repository name - this is
what the others are discussing now.
Think of it as NetBIOS or Appletalk browsing, without the pain of
NetBIOS or Appletalk. This is what allows a Mac OS "Chooser" applet to
present a pile of printer icons for all the printers available across
your local network, so that you can just pick a printer based on its
name and description, rather than knowing its exact address in advance.
DNS aliases work fine when there is a well-known DNS name that everyone
will guess, like 'www.example.com' for a company web site. They don't
work so well for "show all printers or Subversion servers being made
available to me on this LAN". And they don't work if there might be
multiple services of the same type hosted on the same machine, which
could happen for svnserve.
Received on Fri Sep 22 21:36:26 2006