Chief Delphi - Portable Revision Control Server (using Subversion)

Firstly, thank you all for replying! I've been wondering what solutions teams were using for a while now. I also wonder how many teams are still without some sort of code control. It really does simplify life in the end!

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Originally Posted by Mark McLeod (Post 973069)

Interesting solution.

Do you just turn off the wireless to make it Pit legal or do you get permission from the FTA to run an access point?

Good question. The default configuration is to run with wireless off. At our home pit, we have set up a wireless network with both N and G using the kit N router (on 5GHz) and a Dlink G router. So, I would rarely need to use wireless but could be used if necessary (say on a LOOONNNGG bus ride to St. Louis).

Last year at the competition I transfered the repository to a USB stick and we just had only one laptop modifying code at a time. It was definitely nice to have competition revision control. I definitely agree with GGCO that trying to not modify code at competition would be ideal - I have yet to see that on our team however...

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Originally Posted by Joe Ross (Post 973075)

The next time our computer dies, I was planning to look into a plug computer like SheevaPlug

I did think about converting an old laptop, but for multi-point access one would have to bring a switch or connect through an ad-hoc network (not legal in the pit as mentioned above).

The SheevaPlug looks awesome! I may just have to get one to play around with some day. It definitely packs more power than the Broadcom chipset in the router, but if we only use if for file transfer and code check-in and out it seems to be more than adequate. Still, very cool.

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Originally Posted by zombiezen (Post 973086)

Our team has been using Bazaar instead of CVS or Subversion, and that's been working out great. The highlights are:

We were originally just looking for something that worked a little more intuitively than CVS and subversion improved many of the issues that I had with the CVS RCS. Subversion was readily available (and more importantly I knew someone with serious subversion skills) so that's what we chose. I will have to look into Bazaar, looks very interesting.

On a side note, unfortunately we are back in the 20th century at our pit with no internet access whatsoever. We are looking into a 3G connection but we won't have continuous access for a long time probably. So the Google code stuff would be an issue for us - I will have to look into the possibility of using Google code as a backup however to give us online access if we ever needed it.

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Originally Posted by Hugh Meyer (Post 973123)

Two years ago in Atlanta I did a session about how to build a SVN server. After the session I had a team come up and tell me a horror story about how they lost their code in a crashed hard drive during competitions. If you are reading this and do not have version control I would highly recommend you figure it out and get some. It is wonderful!! One of those things after you have it for a while you wonder how you ever got along without it before.

Wow that stinks! First rule of thumb is at least have a backup I guess. The other great thing about SVN is that it has an administrator command to allow two servers to sync. Unfortunately, the embedded version does not have this command, so if I run the router as the main server I can have the tower (that we use currently) sync to it periodically so we have a mirror site as well!

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Originally Posted by demosthenes2k8 (Post 973136)

Yeah, 166 (who mentioned it above <_<) used my external hard drive during GSR, but at Atlanta, we usually either shared a laptop or just plugged the laptops together in an ad-hoc ethernet tangle. The tangle seemed better in my opinion, because it was easy to pull from each other while still being connected to both the robot and the dashboard, where we had FTP'd the log files at the end of the match.

With a subversion router, you could connect the dashboard, robot and up to three other computers at the same time :)

- Bryce

P.S. Sorry to reply back so late. I've been busy at work...