Hi,
I have a situation with one of my clients that seems to call for a novel
solution.
I'll give the "BACKGROUND" first for those of you who want to know "what
problem are you trying to solve anyway?" followed by the "DESIDERATA",
which you can skip to and read first if you are the type of person who
would rather know "so where is he going with all this, get to the point
already!" ;-)
BACKGROUND
----------
One of my clients is a tiny Web design/development/hosting company that
maintains a bunch of web sites/applications for their customers. They
do content and graphic design, while I am in charge of all the geekery.
All the web application assets are controlled under Subversion. I set
up Subversion for them and taught the more technically-inclined of this
crew how to do basic things like committing from a "development" working
copy, updating to a "production" working copy, "svn add" (and a few
other things... but those three are really what he ends up being able to
reliably do). Incidentally, this guy is the only one of the bunch who
has any clue what to do with a Unix shell. The other one does HTML
content updates, and she is completely hopeless when it comes to the
command line. These are People Of The GUI, and I'm not going to be able
to change them.
Sometimes they need to delete/copy/move/rename things (including
directory structures). When the less-skilled of the two needs to do
this -- and I suspect the other one too, sometimes -- they just blunder
on ahead using the Mac Finder (GUI file manager), resulting of course in
a total pooch-screw of Subversion at working copy level.
Now, you might say "Just get them a nice GUI Subversion client to use,
like SVNx for Mac OS X". Only one problem they don't use *local* svn
working copies. The working copies are all on a server, and they mount
the server fs as an AFP share so they can edit (and also use the
accursed Finder) from their own workstations. And actually, it really
has to be that way, for a couple of reasons:
1) These aren't static web-sites, they're served by a Java servlet
framework. So you can't just pull up a page source file in a browser,
you have to be running the servlet application for any of it to work.
Setting these up and starting/stopping them is child's play for someone
with the right skill set (and this is how I work on their projects -- I
have all my own local working copies on my laptop and run the web
applications here), but it's really beyond what these other peeps can
handle, bless their hearts :-). It also has to be on a server so that
when things break, I can access it to witness/debug/fix the problem. If
they were running these on their own machines, they might as well be on
the far side of the Moon.
2) Same goes w.r.t. to Subversion; when they inevitably botch up their
working areas, at least its on a server that I can log in to, so I can
go clean up the mess.
You might also say "maybe you should use a real web-based
content-management system for this kind of thing, instead of a
Subversion repository". But notice that since I have just said, "you
might also say...", nobody need now actually say that... :-)
So then...
DESIDERATA
----------
Suppose there were Subversion client that ran as a server daemon
implementing WebDAV or SMB or NFS or AFP. Its purpose would be to Do
The Right Thing when asked to delete/copy/move/rename elements that are
already under Subversion control. Somebody would still have to go
"under the covers" in order to svn add/commit/update/merge/etc., but I
am already doing that anyway. This would just allow somebody who is
Subversion-blissfully-unaware (and completely command-line-incapable) to
mount a remote Subversion working area and do naive filesystem
manipulations using their GUI of choice, without totally botching up the
working copy metadata.
Does anybody know of such a thing?
Cheers,
ml
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Received on Tue Feb 20 19:05:01 2007