Le blog d'Arhuman

Lately I installed 2 similar tools : gitolite and mercurial-server. The 2 tools achieve the same goal, managing a central repository handling remote virtual users and differ mainly on the dscm they target (as their name imply). As a matter of taste, I tend to prefer git (and so gitolite) beccause of its wider users base and architecture's simplicity. But mercurial has roughly the same potential, and depending on your context you might prefer (or 'have to' in my case) to work with it. But before discussing their benefits, let's detail how to install step-by-step : For gitolite #apt-get install gitolite The following NEW packages will be installed:   git gitolite libcurl3-gnutls liberror-perl rsync A gitolite or git user will be created in the process, for the rest of the document I assume this user to be 'gitolite'. (this is the case on debian and ubuntu) Some people prefer to create a gitolite admin dedicated user, but I prefer to reuse and existing user : su - ...

Whereas github is great for hosting your public repositories, as soon as you want to use many private remote repositories you should consider other options. First because it's going to cost you some money and because it's always a good idea to avoid scatter your private stuffs on external server (Yes I know, as a google minion I'm not a good example...) Among the many options to hosts your remote git repo, I've found gitolite to be the best one to suit my needs, let me explain why : * I firmly believe in the KISS principle, and the fact that you don't need to use another daemon (it just uses sshd) is very appealing to me. (Other solutions often requiring to setup an apache/Webdav vhosts, git-daemon or whatever) * Fine-grained access control : gitolite really shines in this aspect    In addition to the usual  read/write/read&write gitolite provides access  to 'non-fast forward push', branches creation/deletion, write deny and extends t...

Yes I know, this module is already four years old and I'm probably the last Perl coder still using ExtUtils::MakeMaker for his modules. Some experienced friends of mine already told me about it. (Hello Maddingue, better later than never...) I knew that I had to use it, but until today I didn't... For those of you who haven't see the light, here are some reasons why you should switch to it: _ It's easy (and you should be lazy) => make2build from Module::Build::Convert made the conversion a breeze without requiring to read any doc (ok I've read the doc anyway, but it's beccause I'm curious...) _ It's powerful (and you should be impatient) => Build testcover and you have a complete test coverage provided out of the box! (this feature alone is a killer to me, I know you can achieve the same with EU::MM but it is provided by default with Module::Build) _ It's the state of the art (and you should be hubristic): using tool of the pas...