Thursday, January 25, 2007

openCollabNet

Just a quick post to point you to a site that you might not know about: openCollabNet. This is a site being hosted and supported by CollabNet to provide an online community for Subversion and CollabNet users.

It is a pretty cool site that seems to have a lot of information contained within it such as articles, forums, podcasts etc. I will probably start compiling a list of interesting links and add them to a new post in the future, but for now I would suggest you poke around the various parts of the site and you will likely find something useful.

One of the more immediate things you might find interesting on this site is that they are providing binaries for various Subversion components and tools (such as TortoiseSVN and Subclipse) and I believe they will provide support for those binaries. Currently, I think they are only offering Windows binaries. I would really like to see them provide some for OS X as there currently are not any good sources for up to date binaries for OS X. Metissian used to provide a very nice package, but they seem to have stopped providing them. Not many user's are going to want to download and install XCode so that they can build Subversion from source, and many that do seem to run into problems with various parts of the process -- at least those that are building JavaHL. Anyway, hopefully they have OS X support on their to-do list. Linux binaries would also be nice, but at the same time I think the Linux distributions are doing a decent job providing Subversion packages that work properly, so it is slightly less urgent when compared to OS X.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Martin Ott has been a good source of OS X Subversion binaries. http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/

Mark Phippard said...

Yes, but the last time I checked he still was not including the JavaHL library in his packages, which Metissian used to do.

Anonymous said...

If someone wants to have a project on openCollabNet created for them to use for creating and storing and promoting a superlative osX binary of Subversion, please contact the site and someone can work with you, or email me directly and I can start an internal process.

Michel Milano
Lead, User Experience
mmilano [at] collab.net

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark,

Glad you like openCollabNet. Next to Windows, Red Hat Linux binaries are actually available as well and we are working on Solaris. CollabNet indeed provides technical support contracts for these, and other providers, binaries. Check out http://www.collab.net/support/svn_support.html

As Michel suggested, we are looking into giving people who make binaries for other platforms a space on openCollabNet where they can post them, maybe add a support forum and other technical resources. openCollabNet is a community site so that would fit very well.

Best,
Guido Haarmans
Developer Relations, CollabNet

Mark Phippard said...

That would be a step, but I think people will want to get support too. I'd assume CollabNet would only support their binaries.

I find it odd that Red Hat or Solaris would come before OS X. I mean I can see it on the server for support, but building yourself on those OS if you needed to is a lot easier than on OS X. Nonetheless, even a user contributed download would be a good start.