In a new post from Lukas Smith's blog he talks about the project's move to Subversion and away from CVS and how that's affected the language's development in a very positive way.

I remember that back when I was co-RM for PHP 5.3 one of the very painful parts was the crying and moaning about the commit freezes we put into place while packaging up a new release. The reason being we were on CVS, if people kept committing while a release was being tested it would effectively prevent any sort of QA.

Because of problems like this (and many others), the group decided to drop CVS for their development and head to the brighter land of Subversion. So, instead of having days when no commits are allowed, correct branching and testing make it much easier to develop one of the web's most popular languages.

The change came with some new branching techniques and some of the developers in the group aren't as happy about how they're handled. Some new tools have been developed to help minimize the risks that these methods could cause, though, including this site.

Following some issues with the Phing and Propel subversion repositories for Symfony, Fabien Potencier has made a few changes to aid in their future stability.

The Phing and Propel Subversion repositories have suffered from long downtime periods quite often recently (last one was today). It is quite annoying as when it happens, you cannot easily update your symfony repositories, let alone the checkout of a symfony branch. To make things worse, the Doctrine repository also had some problems recently. A lot of symfony users are quite upset by the situation, myself being the first one.

The solution - create some mirrors to provide more than one source to fetch the latest checkouts from. Here's the list of the new resources: Phing mirror, Propel mirror, Doctrine mirror.

The PEAR blog has posted some handy instructions for those out there that want to get PEAR and PEAR2 checkouts working from the new Subversion repository (recently moved from CVS).

Now that pear2 is in svn.php.net, it is possible to do commits with multiple packages using a feature of subversion called "sparse checkouts." [...] Here is the version I used to set up pear and pear2 in a way that will allow committing to both pear and pear2 packages in a single commit.

Rasmus Lerdorf has written about the same thing for the main PHP side of things. All the commands you'll need are there to get things set up and working more efficiently.

The PHP project has been making a major change lately - an upgrade of their version control system of choice from CVS to Subversion. They started the move the other day and now, according to this new post on the PHP.net website, the process has been completed.

The migration from CVS to Subversion is complete. The web interface is at svn.php.net. You can read about it at php.net/svn.php, wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq. The URL to feed to your svn client is http://svn.php.net/repository. There is also a github mirror. Please use that instead of trying to do a full git clone from the svn repository. See the instructions at wiki.php.net/vcs/svnfaq#git.

The instructions contain complete information on how to get and compile this "bleeding edge" (and what libraries you might need to install to get it up and working).

If you're a fan of Planet-PHP (our fellow PHP news source) and have wanted to see how things run behind the scenes, you might want to check out this bit of information from Christian Stocker on where the source has ended up.

After Lukas asked me for the current Planet sources, I realized that I didn't really maintain the sources in the mentioned SVN repository anymore (for various reasons). So I decided to finally move them to GitHub. It makes much more sense there, since the most decent thing to do if you want to set up your own planet is to fork it and git (plus GitHub) makes that painlessly easy. Nevertheless I'm of course still interested in patches.

He warns that the code is a bit on the old side and that the framework its based on has officially been deprecated. If you're still interested, though, you can find (and clone) the application from its GitHub page.

Frederic Marand has pointed out a new subversion repository that's been set up for the documentation on the PHP-GTK project.

After recent complaints in the PHP-GTK mailing list, auroraeosrose mentioned mgdm has set up a SVN repository for the docs, to ease working on them. This new repository is available at http://svn.thefrozenfire.com/phpgtkdoc/

The trunk currently has repositories for the gtkdocs and the phpdoc application you can check out and use to generate and develop on the documentation locally.

Juozas Kaziukenas has a new post to his blog today looking at using Phing to keep files in sync on a shared hosting, FTP only kind of environment.

Today I was trying to use [Phing] in shared hosting server, but as you will see, Phing can't do a lot of it's functionality without direct access to server (over shh for example). [...] Things get worse, when you try to sync files in shared hosting environment, where only FTP is available. [...] Code in the hole some months ago posted solution which uses Net_FTP (FTP functionality wrapper) package to upload files to server. I decided to try given solution, so I modified it to download source code from SVN first and then upload them.

His Phing configuration sets up the application, defining the source directory, the files to push, the FTP connection to make and pushes the files over out of an svn export. He has a slightly different solution (no code/config for this one) that would grab the last revision value from the remote server and only push out the files have have changed since then.

Chuck Burgess has posted a guide for developers out there wanting to get their PEAR packages working with phpUnderControl for builds.

there were some things that I had to discover via trial-and-error with regard to the build files, though possibly they are covered in other pUC docs that I didn't check. The "Getting Started" build example is based on a project sandbox pulling code from a Subversion repository, whereas all my PEAR code comes from CVS.

He talks about his config.xml file (how it turned out that the basic one was all he really needed) and configuring the build.xml to run the tests from the correct location. He also mentions some future ideas like making the builds run the install/upgrade commands before running the tests.

In a recent post Fabien Potencier took a look at one method for getting metadata information from a subversion repository about the project(s) inside.

Last year, I deployed a new tool to manage symfony plugins. The first goal of this tool was to simplify the process of contributing new plugins. [...] The question I wanted to answer was quite simple: How many plugins were created per month before and after the change?

He uses a very handy option to modify the output of an "svn log" command - the "--xml" argument. This outputs the latest information (like author, date, paths and msg) for each of the log entries. This can then be thrown into a call to simple_xml_load_file and parsed down into the numbers he was looking for. He even generated a graph of the results as they coordinated with the different symfony releases.

In this new post to his blog Sebastian Bergmann looks at how to use Bazaar (a dstributed version control system) in his development the PHPUnit tool.

Last December, when I was in Australia and started to work on the Object_Freezer code, I "dived into" Bazaar (bzr) and learned the value of local commits as they allow me to work offline, e.g. when disconnected during travel. Thanks to bzr-svn, I can now work offline for PHPUnit development as well.

He shares his setup - a local shared repository for branching/trunk work and a linked checkout of PHPUnit between Bazaar and Subversion. This allows him to commit locally with Bazaar and, when he gets back online, issue a "merge" command to make the push back out to Subversion's remote repository.