[stellation-res] The server, and self-hosting

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So, finally, the Stellation server machine is pretty much ready to
go. The Eclipse folks have set up the machine, and once I do a bit
of set-up, it will be unveiled.

Based on my work over the last couple of days, there are a few
things that I'd like to finish before we really start using it. I'll
provide my own list at the end of this message, and I'd like to know
what others think are essential before we start really using it. (Just
for info sake: even after we're self-hosting, I plan to mirror changes
into the public CVS for backup.)

I'd also like to propose that initially, we not have an anonymous
account on the server. For at least the first month or so, I'd like
for people to have to explicitly request accounts on the server. (The
accounts will be set up with read-only privileges.) There
are three reasons for this. First, it will somewhat limit the traffic
pounding on the server. Second, with the ACL support being relatively
untested, it gives us a bit of added security - if something goes
wrong, we can tell *who* did it. And finally, it gives us a bit
more information, so that if a certain user crashes the server, we
can reproduce the sequence of operations that they performed
leading up to it.

I've been skimming the code, and the one thing that worries me is ACL
support. I've written a lot of tests that really pound on the ACL
support in the repository, but the command line ACL support is
completely untested. Reading the code, the command-line ACL
stuff is pretty complicated, and with no tests, I have absolutely
no trust that it's bug free. So I'd like to do some code cleanup and
some testing to make sure that it's working correctly.

Our Eclipse support is currently quite weak. The working Eclipse plugin
is based on Jim's first attempt, which was done by wrapping the
command-line in an Eclipse veneer. This was not entirely successful,
because the command-line and the Eclipse workspace have very different
deep assumptions. The plugin mostly works, except that the merge support
does *not* use the Eclipse sync view for conflicts. It places a textual
conflict marker, just like the CVS command-line, and then Eclipse
generates a cascade of syntax errors around the marked conflict.
Personally, I'm willing to live with this in order to get us to start
using Stellation.

Is there anything that anyone else considers crucial before we start
up a Stellation server?

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx/Home: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx