Recently I set up a SubVersion server for my company, and with all good things comes some pain. Authentication, compatibility of components, backup, training, hardware are some of the things you have to take in to account. Its not an easy thing to do, setting up I find takes a few days and maintenance is an ongoing job. Not to mention the fact that if something goes wrong your time gets sunk into research and fixing.
At WebDU this year I went to listen to Geoff Bowers talk about taming the code, and how to manage your developers more effectively whilst making their lives easier. One of the things that really worked for me was that Daemon out source all of their SVN and CVS work to CVSDude. This was attractive to me because pricing is really reasonable and it would take a bunch of work and pain from my daily life. So we had a go and signed up. I have to say now we had a number of questions before we signed up like how to import existing repositories, how to do some post commit functions and more.
Unfortunately CVSDude had some errors with their new site and my questions went unanswered for a few days until I found a support email address, and finally I got into the system. Once this contact was established the service received was fast, effective and very knowledgeable. A big thanks is due to the team there for their help in getting us up and running.
Now because its a hosted service post commits aren’t possible, but they can send an email with the commit details in, so we simply send this to a pop box, then run a task to pop it, update tickets detailed in the message, and notify that projects developers of a change. Getting existing repositories up and running was simply ca case of FTP’ing the repo to CVSDude, and they mounted it for us. Working copies can be relocated easily with Tortoise SVN so the change is easy. All very painless. Now of course, there are way less issues, and this means more time for me to do what I am paid for, develop sites.
