Monthly Archive for May, 2011

uberSVN Updated

Published by George Powell on May 31, 2011 in General, uberSVN and WANdisco. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .


uberSVN evolves! In this first update we’ve fixed some bugs, offer more flexibility with authentication/authorization and added LDAP integration. Check out the details:

What’s New

  • uberSVN can now be integrated with an external LDAP/Active Directory service allowing the management of Subversion users to be centralized.
  • Added the option of using externally managed htpasswd and authz files, giving you more control over authentication and authorization.(ESVNB-1703)
  • Improved Apache error pages have been added. (ESVNB-1696)
  • Improved support for adding existing repositories to uberSVN
  • Numerous enhancements to look and feel

What’s Fixed

Included are more then 30 bug fixes, the most significant are listed below:

  • There’s now improved support for Multibyte (Cyrillic) characters.  Слалкий!
  • The message text that alerts you to the need for an uberSVN restart is now clickable, more easily triggering the required restart. (ESVNB-1442)
  • Improved the warning message that appears during a reinstallation of uberSVN. It now confirms that it is safe to continue installation if you are sure that the previous installation of uberSVN has been uninstalled. (ESVNB-1664)
  • Fixed a problem that stopped the SSL port from being updated once uberSVN was set to run using SSL. (ESVNB-1767)

uberSVN Documentation: http://docs.ubersvn.com/
Download uberSVN: http://www.ubersvn.com/download
Need professional Subversion support? http://www.ubersvn.com/support
Enterprise Subversion:  http://www.wandisco.com/subversion/multisite

A week in Berlin

Published by Hyrum Wright on May 23, 2011 in Subversion and SVN Hackers. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Berlin!

Over four days last week, a dozen Apache Subversion developers were gathered in a conference room in Berlin with copious amounts of food and drink, and told to write code.  We were there at the behest of the elego Software Solutions, who sponsored a hackathon as part of their Subversion Day event.

In addition to giving us cool t-shirts, elego provided space and connectivity to allow us to focus on Subversion development, while discussing technical issues face-to-face.  This enabled some of the high-bandwidth discussion which really helps drive things forward.  During the week, small groups would break off to work out questions or design issues, while others would continue to write and test code.

Among the developers, we also had a larger plenary session to discussion higher-level topics of interest, including:

  • 1.7 release plan
  • Proposed features in 1.8
  • The project’s plans with regard to continued performance improvements
  • Improving the python tests
  • Handling of file externals
  • ra_serf performance and correctness

We also spent a bit of time crafting the next release in the 1.6 series and working on the blocking bugs for 1.7.0.  The general feeling was one of optimism, as we finally see the light at the end of the 1.7 release cycle, and work to fixing the last important bugs before branching.

And of course, since Subversion is an open source project, all the discussions were recorded on the mailing list and in the repository, both for people not spatially or temporally collocated.

I finished the week exhausted and ready to be home, but excited by the work that got done and the potential for the Subversion project.

uberSVN: The Best is Yet to Come!

Published by David Richards on May 13, 2011 in Subversion and uberSVN. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Since the launch a couple of weeks ago the growth of uberSVN has been nothing short of spectacular.  We’ve had thousands of downloads and successful installs.  Probably the only thing to raise our eyebrows a little is the amount of support tickets or to be more precise the lack of them!  I must admit (touch wood) that this is / was by far the best new product launch that I have ever been part of! The feedback (and unsolicited too) has been terrific.  Another well done to the uberSVN team!

It is very important that we don’t rest on our laurels and push forward with new features (such as LDAP integration) and enhancements (which is the posh way of saying bug fixes) and acting on user-feedback.  To that end, we met last week in Napa to sanity check the feature pipeline of uberSVN and our other products.  I think it’s safe to say that the best is yet to come!

We have some pretty big plans for the product.  Indeed the goal from the start was for uberSVN to be a living, expanding product guided by a large community of users.  One of the fundamental early features of uberSVN is the easy to use auto-update mechanism that allows us to offer these new features and functions to users very quickly.

Next week we’ve got a minor release coming out. Here’s what is planned:

  • LDAP Authentication – this has been requested by many users
  • Bug fixes including native language support, loading repos from large dump files.

The next major release will be in late June / early July and we will be announcing some pretty big news at OSCON.  Here’s a sneak-peak:

  • Integration with Subversion MultiSite
  • Scheduling back-up / import
  • Bundling some cool third party tools, pre-integrated with uberSVN.
  • Tool for adding / extending uberSVN.
  • A fully documented API for third party integration.
  • ???? You’ll just have to wait but we have a pretty big surprise up our sleeves!

Partnerships will have a big part to play in the uberSVN ecosystem. We have been working with several leading tools vendors for several months to include them in this new ecosystem and it’s something we are pretty excited about.  We will be opening this up to other vendors after July so if you’re interested in joining the uberSVN ecosystem, drop me a line.

I should also probably address some of the spam comments from our competition friends.  This is not an open source product. Why? Simple, it doesn’t need to be!  We are part of the Apache Subversion project and we believe that Subversion, as a stand-alone product, should continue to be the best SCM product on the planet.  We are going to ensure that uberSVN always uses the latest Subversion Binaries in an unmodified form (our uberSVN users will be able to automatically install the new release of Subversion, 1.6.17, due out next week). In fact we will always offer the open source subversion binaries on our website.  It’s important to us that we always offer users a choice.

It’s a Beta product.  Gmail was in Beta for 5 years. I was one of the early users and used it for banking, my kids’ school stuff and a whole bunch of things that I couldn’t really do without.  It didn’t mean that it didn’t work.  In fact Google only removed the Beta tag when they believed that “the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase.”  In this case we are looking to reach a ‘complete’ set of features – as I said earlier this product is going to get much bigger – in the words of old blue eyes “the best is yet to come!“