It probably interests no one but me, but I’m becoming more of an SVN ninja. It took me days to figure out how to setup a web accessible SVN server with appropriate web, svn and filesystem permissions (i.e. this repository is world readable, but can only be written to by me). I’ve been using SVN on the client side for a couple of years now, though not as a ninja, because of WordPress. In essence, I was downloading nightly builds of WordPress when it was 1.6-alpha (what would become the 2.0.x branch). Now, I am building everything on top of SVN, from plugins to personal projects, to contractor projects and on. Repositories are a commodity and with change control and versioning, it makes it dirt easy to revert when something is broke.
So I took the next logical step personally, and wrote a cron job to automatically svn me to trunk every day. That means I’ll always be running the latest.
Scary.
Q: What if WordPress introduces a bug that breaks the blog?
A: I can easily revert back to an early revision thanks to SVN.
Q: Why run unstable software?
A: Because this is a biggish blog (Top 2600 in Technorati today, whoo!) and no better way to find bugs and squash them before WordPress 2.2 is launched (in Aprilish) than to run trunk constantly in a big environment. WordPress.com runs trunk as well, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.
Q: Aren’t you worried about hackers?
A: I’ll answer this gently… Not really. I don’t invite them to hack me, but if they do then it’s good exposure on a flaw and we have kick-ass backup support at LogicWorks. So no, not really. The good outweighs the bad here.
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
Subversion is about the only thing I can manage to keep running ;)
But Aaron, you ever think of giving Capistrano a shot? I’ve been meaning to get around to testing it on a project but haven’t actually had the time yet.
Check it out man… looks like it could be a great way to do deployment, and even possibly become a tool for you b5 guys ;)
http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17