Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Change SVN repository location

For some reason, repositories can be moved around. If you are using a working copy to develop a program or web-application or whatever, the move usually only implies a ‘check-out’ and you are set.

However, sometimes the repository is part of a production environment. To be precise, the production version is prepped in a special branch and then deployed using Subversion. Upgrading a website to a newer version only requires a ‘svn up’ and if you automate the database upgrades as well, web management becomes a breeze.

You might imagine that moving the repository in such an environment is less than desirable: each site or application which is part of that repository becomes un-upgradable and checking out everything by hand and setting it all up (plus the verification that every part is still functional) becomes a time consuming task.

However, the SVN information is all stored in plain text files. The following snippet switches the repository from http://svn.mydomain.com/svn to svn://svn.someotherdomain.com. This means you can quickly switch protocol, host names or even the location within a certain host. Simply copy-paste the code below into a file in the directory holding one or more projects for that repository, change the URLs (do not forget to escape by replacing ‘/’ with ‘\/’) and run the script.

#!/bin/bash
DIRS=`find . -name ".svn"`
for dir in ${DIRS}
do
  echo "Processing $dir"
  FILES=`find $dir`
  for file in ${FILES}
  do
    if [ -f ${file} ]; then
      echo "Fixing '${file}'..."
      sed 's/http:\/\/svn.mydomain.com/svn:\/\/svn.someotherdomain.com/g' "${file}" > "${file}.tmp"
      mv "${file}.tmp" "${file}"
    fi
  done
done
Categories
General blog entries

Radio silence

Visitors dwindling to my site, I decided it was time to write something again after 3 months. Its not that I stopped working with computers but rather that my attention moved from working with computers to studying Computer Science. Something that is hard to combine if you are making a dash to the finish line.

In other words: I am finishing my last courses in the coming days and will begin on my thesis. I haven’t decided yet if I will post things from my thesis yet (as extra content). Not so much because of the extra time but also because not everything is interesting and some information is classified – making other things inexplicable or incomplete if I were to post it online.

On to more important things: KDE 4.4 is about to hit the virtual shelves! Besides more polishing and some other features, it finally comes with a full blogging client (as part of the base system).

“What”, you say, “they fixed KBlogger?” Heck no, KBlogger is still dead as a door nail and as buggy as it has been forever. It seems that someone got the bright idea to actually replace KBlogger altogether with Bilbo – the tool I talked about before. One of the major issues Bilbo had, was that fact that nobody knew it. Personally, I think this comes from the name: Bilbo – as it is also the name from one of Tolkiens books. If you now think “Lord of the Rings”, you should be ashamed: Bilbo is part of the story *before* LOTR, he just happens to be alive in the epic story afterwards…

But I digress.

The fact remains that finding the program (even if you know that it exists) becomes hard because all search engines will refer you to hits about the wrong topic. Also, as you might imagine, some folks (*cough*copyright holders*cough*) might have issues with the naming. So it was renamed from Bilbo to Blogilo a while back and as such can now be part of the whole KDE experience. Hurray!

Next time I will probably explain about a project (formal model checker, based on the Promela language) I have been working on and the surprisingly bad hash functions I found on the internet…

Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Fixing Vmware mouse flicker

After upgrading a VM from Ubuntu 9.04 to Xubuntu 9.10 I noticed that the mouse cursor works fine in a certain region (say 640×480) but outside that region, it flickers between the actual mouse position and the edge of the region.

After reinstalling X a few times and upgrading the VMware tools I found the solution: it is a bug in the newer GTK versions. Since I amd running Gentoo (unstable aka bleeding edge) I am one of the lucky owners of this new bug.

The solution seems to be to instruct VMWare Player or Workstation (I use 6.5.x) to use its bundled GTK instead of the system one:

echo "VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes" >> /etc/vmware/bootstrap