openCollabNet Technical Newsletter - Volume 17, April 2008

On Tuesday April 29th we will upgrade openCollabNet with a lot of new features and content (the site will be offline from 1pm to 6pm Pacific Time). Among the highlights:

Check back on Wednesday, April 30th at http://open.collab.net.

In the mean time, the Subversion community released its first publicly available Release Candidate for Subversion 1.5. Read on …

Best regards,
Guido Haarmans
Developer Relations, CollabNet

The newsletter archive is at http://www.open.collab.net/newsletter/newsletter.html.


Subversion 1.5 Release Candidate

On April 24th, the Subversion development community released the first official Release Candidate for Subversion 1.5, labeled RC4 (RC1 through RC3 were never released). RC4 starts the soak period during which users test the release candidate and provide feedback. The soak period lasts at least four weeks and the developers will restart it if new builds warrant a new test cycle.

CollabNet has created binaries to make it easy for you to test the Release Candidate and provide feedback. If you find bugs, please report them; if things are working out well, report that too. Positive feedback is a crucial part of the soak period because the developers need to know that people are actually testing the Release Candidate. You can provide feedback in the Subversion 1.5 beta testing forum, or the users@ mailing list on Tigris.

You can also test CollabNet’s new graphical merge client for Subversion 1.5 (based on Subclipse) and there are links on openCollabNet to the 1.5 release for TortoiseSVN and other tools. Give these tools a try too and provide the respective development communities with feedback.

Read the blog post and download the Release Candidate.

What’s New in Subclipse with Subversion 1.5

Subclipse is a full-featured Subversion client that is tightly integrated into the Eclipse IDE. The next Subclipse release is 1.4, available at the same time as Subversion 1.5. Here are some of the key new features in Subclipse 1.4:

• Atomic commits: Subclipse 1.4 supports atomic commits across Eclipse projects.
• Refactoring improvements: Better renaming support in Subversion 1.5 allows improvements in Subclipse’s refactoring features.
• Compare improvements: Significant performance improvements to the compare process. For example, you can now use Eclipse graphical compare for entire branches and get good performance.
• Create Patch: The patch process was greatly enhanced. This feature now works well with Mylyn, so you can drag and drop patches to tasks in Mylyn and create patches from Mylyn-created change sets.
• Multiple Selections: A real time saver is support for multiple selections. For example, you can now select multiple Eclipse projects and tag or switch them all together. 
• User Interface: The UI was completely overhauled, resulting in an easier to use plugin.
• Merge Tracking: Merge Tracking support was added through the Merge Tracking extension from CollabNet.

To see a full overview of the new features of Subclipse - including a demo - watch the replay of Mark Phippard’s webinar.

Coming Soon: CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise 5.0

The next release of SourceForge Enterprise Edition (called: CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise 5.0) will make some of the most popular features of CollabNet Enterprise Edition available for the first time to SFEE users, including:

• Project Pages that allow users to create and edit the structure of the project home page, including unlimited nesting of project content pages.
• Configurable portlet-like project components, such as Documents, News, Project Statistics, and Tracker Search Results, which make it much easier for individual project teams to show their current status, share information and start up quickly.
• ALM templates that include content as well as project structure, which project managers can use as configurable blueprints for artifact relationships and workflows.
• New flexible branding capabilities that make it easier for customers to customize the site to match their own preferred look and feel.

In addition, SourceForge Enterprise 5.0 offers a number of usability improvements such as improved navigation, mouse-over menus, "Jump to ID" buttons, more shortcuts to popular commands and recent artifacts, and an enhanced help system integrated with openCollabNet discussion forums.

Diagnosing Common Subversion Error Messages within CollabNet Enterprise Edition

When diagnosing SVN errors on CollabNet Enterprise Edition:

• Make sure that you use the following URL construct during checkout: http(s)//[projectname].domainname/svn/[projectname]/trunk (where "[projectname]" is the name of your project).
• Make sure that you have proper permissions by going to the Membership link on the project that you are working on. If you have the role of Content Viewer, Observer, Power User, Project Analyst, Executive, or Project Content Developer, then you may view code, but not edit it. To do most SVN commands you need to have Developer-Committer, Project Owner, or some other project-specific role that includes the permissions VersionControl - Modify, VersionControl - Add, and VersionControl - Delete.
• If you have recently changed your password, but Subversion has not prompted for re-authentication, delete the svn.simple file. (On Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\yourusername\Application Data\Subversion\auth\svn.simple). Delete the file that relates to the project you need to authenticate against. You can verify this by opening the files and looking for the URL to your project. Deleting this file forces Subversion to authenticate you again.
• Make sure that your proxy is setup properly.
• If your working copy is out of sync with the web-based repository, or the icons in your IDE are not properly representing the state of your repository, run svn cleanup. If the cleanup doesn't fix things then save any files in question and create a new working copy. Keep in mind that you don't have to delete your existing working copy first. Just create a new working copy, verify that it has everything you expect, and then remove the old working copy.

Updated Subversion to HP Quality Center Connector

Users of the CollabNet Subversion Connector to HP Quality Center reported problems with deployments where the Quality Center repository and server are on separate physical servers. We’ve updated the connector to fix this problem.

The CollabNet Subversion Connector to HP Quality Center allows Quality Center test plans to be versioned in a CollabNet Subversion repository. This enables features such as rolling back to a previous version of a test plan and tracking who is working on a test plan, as well as the history of changes that have been made to it. The connector is available for Quality Center 8.2, 9.0 and 9.2.
Download the latest connectors from openCollabNet.

The Open Source Census

Get Hard Facts on Open Source from The Open Source Census

Want to learn what open source projects are used most?  Want to know what open source you are using? Want to benchmark your company’s open source usage? Check out The Open Source Census at http://www.osscensus.org. The Open Source Census is a global, collaborative initiative to quantify open source usage in the enterprise. The project was initiated by OpenLogic, a CollabNet partner. You participate by scanning one or more of your machines and anonymously contributing results to the census. When you participate in The Open Source Census, you will use the OSS Discovery tool to scan machines. Check out the community site for OSS Discovery at http://ossdiscovery.opensource.collab.net/.

As a participant, you can see your inventory across all machines scanned and benchmark your company’s open source usage to similar companies. At the same time, you contribute to the project by aggregating data that helps to promote further open source usage. The Open Source Census is sponsored by OpenLogic, CollabNet, IDC, Unisys, Navica, The Olliance Group, Holmes, Roberts & Owen, Open Solutions Alliance and the Open Source Business Foundation.  Learn more at www.osscensus.org

How to Establish an SSH / Putty Session to a Linux or Solaris CUBiT System Using an SSH Tunnel

CUBiT is CollabNet’s system to rapidly set-up and tear-down build and test environments. CUBiT uses a pool of servers and configurable profiles that describe software stacks that you want to load automatically on servers you reserve from the pool. CUBiT supports SSH tunneling from your desktop to machines that you have reserved for build and test work.

To set up the SSH tunnel, check that it is configured correctly using Putty:

1. Check that the Host Name is set correctly.
2. Go into your session settings and review SSH -> Tunnels. Make sure that your SSH tunnel rule exists and is set correctly.
3. Make sure that your initial Putty tunnel that creates the SSH tunnel remains open while you open an SSH session to a CUBiT system.
4. Make sure that your initial SSH tunnel session responds with the “Tunnel established” message.
5. Make sure that the high-numbered port that you specified for your local workstation in your rule does not conflict with any other listening services. You can determine this by running “netstat –an” from a command prompt and reviewing all LISTENING services and cross reference port numbers.

Discussion of the Month

A Subclipse user has a problem using his Unix login name as the author during Subversion commits. Read the answer on the openCollabNet Subversion forum.

Webinar Replay: Five Steps Towards a Successful Subversion Migration

CollabNet and CMC Media recently held the webinar “Turn Subversion On! Five Steps Towards a Successful Migration”, dedicated to the topic of migrating from a legacy system to Subversion. Over 1,200 people registered to learn about best practices and tools that can help you in the process of migrating to Subversion from systems such as ClearCase, CVS, Visual SourceSafe and PVCS.

If you missed the Subversion Migration webinar, you can view the replay.

CollabNet Webcasts and Live Demos

The ROI of Distributed Development (CollabNet & Dr. Dobbs Journal) - May 1
Discover the hard and soft ROI benefits from actual customer case studies.

CollabNet Live! CUBiT - May 13
Join us for a 30-minute live demonstration of this virtualization software in action.

CollabNet Live! SourceForge Enterprise Edition – May 20
A 30-minute live demonstration of this Subversion-based collaborative development solution.