Community members who are close watchers of our Subversion repository may have noticed that it’s been stuck on revision 9803 for about a week and a half and may have wondered “Hey, what’s up? Are you all on vacation? Maybe still recovering from the Fourth of July?”

Well, I can assure you that all of us here at the Nest have been working really hard on the next Bird release, Fugazi. The reason publicsvn hasn’t received any updates is because on the 27th, I started work on reorganizing our Subversion repository into separate repositories.

We did this for a number of reasons, including

• Separating out binaries, which is how we track dependent libraries, from source code
• Create clearer lines between various types of source code that we have in our repository
• Create a better, clearer structure that better models our development process
• Isolate commonly used source code in a smaller repository, so (especially recursive) operations, like updates, checkins, and diffs are faster
• Move towards a more standard Subversion repository layout (no more branches/BranchName/trunk!

Just today, we finished splitting and reorganizing the repository. The process took a really long time because parts of our repository were so large, they took almost eight hours to load every time we ran a conversion scenario!

Now that it’s completed, I’m working on getting publicsvn mirror back up and running as well updating all the developer documentation with what the new repository paths are.

Tyler, our IT guy, also surprised me today by letting me know that we have a new, faster machine for publicsvn! So, we’re getting that machine all ready to go here in the Nest before we send it out to the colo.

It looks like we’ll have publicsvn back up, mirroring Bird diffs by early next week, Tuesday, July 15th at the latest. For community members who are working on patches or tracking our source, we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. But we think you’ll be pleased with the renovations we’ve done to the Bird’s source code-nest.