Tuesday, November 13, 2007

New Subversion server for Openbravo project

For the last 18 months Openbravo project has been using the Subversion service offered by Sourceforge to maintain the source code repository. Starting on November 2007, we start to use a Subversion server fully managed by us, and mirroring this repository to the Sourceforge server.

Having our own server allows us to offer better services to our community of developers that we can't do through standard Sourceforge services since some of the capabilities of subversion are partially truncated: like creating new repositories, private branches or better control in terms of server administration.

We plan to do is to create a branch for each developer in our community where they will be able to develop new functionalities. All the community-provided functionalities could be later be include as core functionalities of Openbravo or be packaged as plug-ins.

Openbravo will keep the Sourceforge subversion repository alive and synchronized using svk (as a read-only repository). This synchronization allows us to achieve three objectives:

1) Save bandwidth since most SVN access is in read only mode.
2) Preserve our activity ranking on SourceForge. Openbravo is still a very young project and we have been receiving a lot of attention from being one of the top projects in SourceForge; this has benefited both us and the community and it is very important for us to continue to be part of SourceForge.
3) Have a backup server in case the main Subversion server is down.

We have a document the explains how to access the new Subversion server. Also there is a new web based interface that allow browsing the repository and also subscribe to the changes using a RSS feed reader. If you are working on localization note that we have create a separate repository to store all the localizations.

Please, if you have any question or you need access to the Subversion repository you can contact me (jmas at openbravo.com).

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