Category: Programming

One of the major purposes of software design is to avoid making mistakes. You design your software so you don’t get halfway into the project and say “Oh yeah I didn’t think about that” and have to start over again or continue with a weak foundation. Unfortunatley don’t know exatly what type of mistakes you are likely to make until after you start coding. Since you don’t really know what the real problems are until after you encounter them, you are left with two options. First you can create your design to eliminate problems that you’ve experienced in other project. Second you can build a prototype to get an idea of what will be a problem then design and code the final system.

Trying to plan ahead and eliminate problems before they occur sounds like a great idea, but it often increases the complexity of the project. This isn’t a bad thing if the increased complexity solves real problems, but since you are trying to solve “imagined” problems before they actually occur, some won’t turn out to be problems at all. This means that that software is more complex than necessary.

If you want to access svn over ssh, you need to make sure that everyone has the correct file permissions. In the following steps we create a directory named svn-repo and change it’s ownership to a group called svn. Then we create the repository and change the security to allow access by people in the svn group.

mkdir svn-repo
chgrp -R svn svn-repo
cd svn-repo
svnadmin create
chmod -R 770 .
chmod g+s db

On Unix and Linux clients using svn over ssh is very straight forward. Windows is a little more tricky. You’ll need to download plink.exe (one of the downloads with putty.exe) and the subversion command line client. Install them and then copy all the files to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. You now need to make sure that SVN knows to run plink for ssh. Do this by issuing:
set SVN_SSH=plink.exe -l [username] -pw [password]
This will tell SVN how to log in using ssh. (You’ll probably want to add this to your profile so you don’t have to run it each time. You may also need to logon once using plink.exe to get the keys to work. To do this just connect to the SVN server using ssh (plink [email protected]).

Once this is set you should be able to use svn normally.