Hey buddy, can you spare two bits?

We've been opening up our code a bit lately. I know that sounds weird coming from an open source company, but we've traditionally been very, very cautious with who
gets a "commit bit" to our products.  Only two or three people outside Best Practical have commit rights to RT.  SVK has a richer cast of characters.  With Jifty, we've fully embraced Audrey Tang's methodology. When she's feeling confrontational, she calls it "Anarchistic Development." When she's talking to folks with a more Web 2.0 bent, she calls it "Wiki Style Development".  Just about anybody who shows up has commit privileges thrust upon them.  It's worked amazingly well for Pugs. So we figured we'd try it for Jifty.

If we were hosting Jifty somewhere like SourceForge or Google Code, we could just add people by email address and the system would take care of sending them email, getting them a password and so on.  We really prefer to host things locally, which left us in a bit of a vacuum. We couldn't find a single good tool for handing out commit bits and managing projects in a Subversion repository.

I bet you can tell where this is going.

We've got another new project.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to present CommitBit, a subversion access management system with built in support for a "code.example.com" project directory.

CommitBit lets you, the administrator, set up repositories and projects through a simple web interface. You can grant an individual  a commit or admin bit to a specific project just by typing his or her email address into CommitBit's web ui.  Project administrators can, somewhat unsurprisingly, grant commit or admin bits to others through the same interface.  CommitBit takes care of notifying the new project member, setting up their password and so on.

On the backend, CommitBit can set up new subversion repositories or work with preexisting local repositories. It manages a bunch of files so you don't have to:

• htpasswd files for svn over WebDAV
• passwd files for svnserve
• authz files that work with both
• an apache2 configuration snippet

On the "codedot" side, you a project listing, the ability to spotlight whatever's currently hot and per-project overview pages with lists of committers, pointers to your bug tracker, wiki, mailing lists, Subversion repository, repository browser and so on.

If you're interested in CommitBit, you can find out more about it at code.bestpractical.com:

http://code.bestpractical.com/project/CommitBit

SVK 2.0 Technology Preview 1

I'm glad to announce svk 2.0 technology preview 1 (tp1); we are on the
way to our 2.0 release, scheduled to come out before Christmas.

Although this is not a stable release, we have been using this version
for daily development without issues.  So please upgrade if you'd like
to help with testing and to try out the new features below.

This is the first major release after 18 months of development since
svk 1.0 was released in May 2005, and there have been exciting
improvements and features since then.  Here are some highlights:

* Interactive commits

You can now use "svk commit --interactive".  svk will work you
through each chunk of changes in each file, and let you decide
exactly which ones you want to commit.

* Floating checkout

You can now use "svk checkout --float" to have the checkout metadata
stored in the toplevel directory of the checkout copy.  This allows
you to move the checkout copy around without having to use "svk
checkout --relocate".

* View support

svk's "views" are much like views in databases. You can now set up a
"view" that is actually a map to different parts of a
repository. You can then check out the "view" and work with it as if
it's just an ordinary svk checkout path.

Please note that this feature is still of beta-quality; some
commands do not work properly in view checkouts.  We plan to fix
them before the tp2 release.

* Log filter plugins

You can now write custom log processing plugins for filtering and
displaying log messages; svk ships with several, and others are
available on CPAN.  For example, try "svk log --filter 'author
clkao'" or "svk log --output stat" (the latter requires
SVK::Log::Filter::Stats from CPAN).

* Better copy and rename support across merge.

This solves the problem described in:

http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2005-08/0712.shtml

* Startup time improvements

* Many, many bugfixes and tiny features

Cheers,
CLK

(posted by Jesse)

*taptaptap* Is this thing on?

Here at Best Practical, our web presence has been...somewhat scattered. Between our internal "news" section inside hiveminder hiveminders.blogspot.com, the rt-announce mailing list and our various personal blogs, our corporate message has been scattered, at best. And we haven't really had a good forum to announce new projects like CommitBit, Mnemonic, Jifty and the "Bad osftware ideas" we sometimes refer to as Worst Impractical Solutions.

Back when we had an old-school marketing person who prided herself on the size and depth of her rolodex,bestpractical.com had a news section that we kept up to date.   For the past few years, we've been far too technology focused. We haven't had a good forum to get the word out about all the cool stuff we're doing (to say nothing of all the horribly embarrassing, but funny stories about life as a small, self-funded software company.)

I can't promise that we won't subject you to my ideas about what makes a programmer good or a programming language suck. We're as opinionated as everybody else who's been doing this for a while. But mostly, I suspect that we're going to be too busy building things to play the punditry game very much.

That's all a bit of a long-winded way to say:

Hi!