SVN Hackery
Ainalda and I did a software upgrade on the server today. This is our first upgrade since the Sarge roll-over. I am pleased to report that, to my knowledge, nothing is broken. If you notice any abnormalities, please let me know via e-mail. While I was tweaking the server, I took the opportunity to fix my Moot interface script so that my
I'm starting to get frustrated with the structural fallabilities of MoinMoin. Ainalda and I are both eager to develop a new Wiki system that will use an SVN back-end. Unfortunately, there are a number of issues that complicate CGI SVN access. We have discovered that local repository access from any user other than www-data will alter permissions and make the repository inaccessable.
We have looked at several systems that externally interface with a local SVN repository, and most of them are pretty convoluted. WebSVN is a PHP CGI system that provides a quality HTML interface for repository browsing. It uses a wrapper that sits on top of the svnlook command line utility, which is a really nasty hack. I started looking at other solutions, namely Trac, a Wiki, repository browser, and bug tracking system that integrates with SVN via Python. They use the official SVN Python bindings, which are the grotesque result of a failed Swig experiment.
Although no documentation is available for the SVN Python bindings, I did manage to find some semi-useful examples at Koders. Using those examples and some interactive Python pounding, I managed to produce a Python script that, when run as www-data, will display the requested file from a particular revision of the repository.
Tags: python, programming, subversion
Posted on 2005-07-110 comments
