We’ve been opening up our code a bit lately. I know that sounds weird
coming from an open source company, but we’ve traditionally been
very, very cautious with who gets a “commit bit” to our products.
Only two or three people outside Best Practical have commit rights to
RT. SVK has a richer cast of characters. With Jifty, we’ve fully
embraced Audrey Tang’s methodology. When she’s feeling
confrontational, she calls it “Anarchistic Development.” When she’s
talking to folks with a more Web 2.0 bent, she calls it “Wiki Style
Development”. Just about anybody who shows up has commit privileges
thrust upon them. It’s worked amazingly well for Pugs. So we figured
we’d try it for Jifty.
If we were hosting Jifty somewhere like SourceForge or Google Code,
we could just add people by email address and the system would take
care of sending them email, getting them a password and so on. We
really prefer to host things locally, which left us in a bit of a
vacuum. We couldn’t find a single good tool for handing out commit
bits and managing projects in a Subversion repository.
I bet you can tell where this is going.
We’ve got another new project.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to present CommitBit, a
subversion access management system with built in support for a
“code.example.com” style project directory.
CommitBit lets you, the administrator, set up repositories and
projects through a simple web interface. You can grant an individual
a commit or admin bit to a specific project just by typing his or her
email address into CommitBit’s web ui. Project administrators can,
somewhat unsurprisingly, grant commit or admin bits to others through
the same interface. CommitBit takes care of notifying the new
project member, setting up their password and so on.
On the backend, CommitBit can set up new subversion repositories or
work with preexisting local repositories. It manages a bunch of files
so you don’t have to:
* htpasswd files for svn over WebDAV
* passwd files for svnserve
* authz files that work with both
* an apache2 configuration snippet
On the “codedot” side, you a project listing, the ability to
spotlight whatever’s currently hot and per-project overview pages
with lists of committers, pointers to your bug tracker, wiki, mailing
lists, Subversion repository, repository browser and so on.
If you’re interested in CommitBit, you can find out more about it at
code.bestpractical.com:
http://code.bestpractical.com/project/CommitBit
Best,
Jesse
PGP.sig (186 Bytes)