[wp-hackers] SVN: /branches/stable/

[Peter Westwood]

On Fri, September 29, 2006 3:35 pm, Doug Stewart wrote:
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> Brian Layman wrote:
>> I agree with that sentiment! However I don't understand the concern
>> about
>> the Berkeley DB backend.  Is there an inherent stability issue with BDB?
>>  Or
>> are you people just concerned about the info being in a DB rather than a
>> file system?  StarTeam, the versioning system with which I'm most
>> familiar,
>> stores your versioning info in a MS SQL* db.  That just means that your
>> backup procedure has to include the database.  There are plenty of
>> mission
>> critical operations that depend on MS SQL DB data never being lost.  So,
>> after implementing our procedures (RAID (grin), Backups and etc), we
>> feel
>> quite safe and haven't lost any code since the switch over to MySQL.
>>
>>
>> *You could also use other backends like MS Access if you REALLY want to
>> stress that backup system... When our StarTeam system was setup in the
>> mid
>> 90s we used MS Access and definitely had corruptions over the years...
>> But
>> then again, that's one thing large Access DBs are known for...
>>
> You're not looking at this as an engineer.  Backups run nightly, meaning
> that it's quite possible to lose up to and including an entire working
> day's worth of work.  Most use cvs as a real-time backup option,
> checking in intermediate versions/working copies of stuff that's only
> halfway to compilation-ready status so that they can have the security
> of knowing they have copies out the wazoo ready to fall back on. In
> these situations, falling back to last night's tape is cold comfort for
> engineers who lost 4 man-hours of blood, sweat n' tears to a protracted
> fight with gcc.
>
> CVS lets said engineers get at the raw files and diffs which could
> theoretically allow them to reconstruct a valid codebase BY HAND,
> whereas SVN uses binary files or DBs to obscure the code in such a
> fashion as to make such by-hand reconstructions difficult, to say the
> least.
>

If your _that_ paranoid about losing your changes you can use the svn hook
scripts to run svnadmin hotcopy [1] or svnadmin dump --incremental to
ensure you always have a backup of your repository.

That way you don't need to rebuild your broken repo as you always have a
backup.

[1] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/re33.html
[2] http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/re31.html

westi
-- 
Peter Westwood <peter.westwood at ftwr.co.uk>
http://blog.ftwr.co.uk