A few questions

[Alexander Johannesen <aj...@nla.gov.au>]

Hi,

DISCLAIMER : Total newbie to both VCS and Subversion,
although have used CVS for simplest things.


I'm evaluating if Subversion is the right way for us to go, and as 
much as I've been reading up on it, it looks like the beast we
might go for. But I have a few questions;

How do you best handle a workflow situation where committers
committ to the system, but administrators must approve their
changes before allowed further? My thinking is along having
three copies; "play", "approved", and "production" (where the 
latter two are more or less mirrors). Normal users committ
changes to the "play" copy, and the system notifies an/several
administrators of changes for review, and they further approve
(into "production") or rollback changes (in "play"). Any best 
practices? Ideas? (Have googled a bit for this, but all have turned
up nil)

If we store things in the metadata repository, does it exsist 
hooks to link these to other systems? Our system has content
files and separate metadata, and it would be beneficial for us if 
our templating system could read the metadata for processing.
(Alternativly we seperate metadata into XML files, or somesuch)

Some have stated some unstability with BerkleyDB. Any plans on a
replacement, ever?


Kind regards,

Alexander
NLA, ACT, Australia

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Re: A few questions

[Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>]

Alexander Johannesen wrote:

> How do you best handle a workflow situation where committers
> committ to the system, but administrators must approve their
> changes before allowed further?

Have every committer commit their change (feature, bugfix, whatever) to 
a private branch.  Use an external communication system for notifying 
managers that branches are "done" and ready for review.  If the manager 
approves of the change, then somebody (either manager or coder) merges 
the branch to the main trunk, and then deletes the branch.

Subversion has no built-in workflow system.  At best, you can use 
Subversion's metadata properties to help.  A programmer can set a 
property on his branch that indicates that it's ready for review, and a 
manager can change the property to indicate that the branch is ready to 
be merged into the trunk.  You need to invent a system that works best 
for you.

> If we store things in the metadata repository, does it exsist 
> hooks to link these to other systems? 

I'm sure external workflow systems can be taught to store their own 
metadata in Subversion, or, conversely, to read metadata from 
Subversion.  But that's an integration problem you need to solve 
yourself.  Subversion provides very general versioned metadata;  you 
need to figure out how you want to use it.

> Some have stated some unstability with BerkleyDB. Any plans on a
> replacement, ever?

Yes, someday we hope to have a SQL back-end, or even a plain filesystem 
back-end.


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