SourceForge CVS Servers Get an Upgrade
Posted by Neil Crosby on May 13, 2006 08:53 AM
A couple of months ago now I decided that it would be a good idea to put Standardista Table Sorting onto SourceForge (the Standardista Table Sorting project page). There were two main reasons for this. Firstly, it would allow the community to easily communicate feature requests and bug reports to me. Secondly, it would mean that I would be able to have the abilty to roll back to a previous version if I happened to balls things up at any point and stop things working. Likewise, I’d be able to update the module at any time and immediately anyone who cared would be able to download the current unreleased version from the CVS repository. It sounded great.
So it was a bit annoying when, a couple of weeks later, I found myself unable to upload my altered files. At first, I assumed that I’d done something to my machine to cause the problem. I started rooting around in my settings, seeing if I could get anything to work at all. I got nothing. It turns out that I’d done nothing at all, but that it was a problem with SourceForge’s developer CVS server - it was quite possible for anonymous users to download from the CVS, but developers were left out in the cold - unable to check anything in.
I looked stoicly on the event though - these things happen, at least it wasn’t a problem with my machine, and it would all start working again soon. And it did. For a couple of weeks. This time when the server went down, it went down big style. If I remember correctly, there was about 12 hours downtime on a day that I was going to get stuck into some serious coding. When I’m coding I like to commit early and often - as soon as I’ve written a small piece of code, and it’s been tested, it gets commited. This might mean that things take a little longer to get written, but I get the big benefit of knowing which changes I made were meant to achieve what. So, having the CVS server go down for an entire day’s worth of coding was not a good thing for me. In fact, it was what pushed me into switching over to use Subversion for Standardista Table Sorting’s repository.
There’s a happy end to the story though. This morning I received an email from SourceForge announcing that they’ve just finished deploying a brand new set of CVS servers that should help to ensure that if things do start going wrong again, they’ll only affect a small subsection of users and everything can be brought back up again much more easily. Excellent news, in my opinion!