subversion

How to customize a WordPress plugin and upgrade

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Sometimes you want to make minor changes to WordPress plugins that no body except your self would want. Then comes the issue of upgrading to new versions of the plugin. git-svn is the perfect tool for this. It has all the cool features of the distributed SCM git and ability to pull from subversion (and push to it as well). Here is how I do it:

  1. Clone the trunk [code language=’shell’ options=’toolbar: false; gutter: false;’]git svn clone http://svn.wp-plugins.org/web-invoice/trunk/[/code]
  2. Make your changes
  3. Commit changes locally [code language=’shell’ options=’toolbar: false; gutter: false;’]git commit -a[/code]
  4. Pull new changes (e.g. new release). Git is very good at merging, you will not have conflicts unless you edit exact same lines in the local version. Still a manual merge shouldn’t be too complicated [code language=’shell’ options=’toolbar: false; gutter: false;’]git svn rebase[/code]

In the example I have taken the svn trunk of Web Invoice WordPress plugin. Hope you find this information useful next time you hack a WordPress plugin.

Subversion to Git

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My new year resolution was to ditch Subversion and move to Git. I switched to Git as my SCM for all my development work on new year day it self. I did hit some issues because my ignorance about how things are done with Git, however everything was fixed within the day. Now, 20 days later; I’m really happy that I did make the switch. Git has reduced development time greatly. No longer do I think about whether I should commit, wait for commit to finish for many minutes, or worry about overwriting someone’s work. Now I spend more time doing actual development than thinking about planning merges and commits.

I’ll blog about the few gotchas that I faced when I have time, hopefully soon. Development is fun again, thanks to Git. 🙂

Adding color to subversion

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If you love the command line and svn but would like to add some color as well, you could try colorsvn.
colorsvn is identical to svn when it comes to commands, but the results are shown in color.

colorsvn is particularly handy if there are any conflicts created during an update.

See http://colorsvn.tigris.org/ for more.

svnserve Init script

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I was annoyed to have to start the svnserve as a daemon everytime I restarted the machine. I also wanted to use service configuration(GNOME) to deal with the service.

I looked all over the web and failed to find the a good one. So I thought of writing it my self. Last weekend I sat down and wrote the script. Here is the result.

This was tested on fc6 running kernel 2.6.20-1.2962.fc6. Subversion 1.4.2 (subversion-1.4.2-2.fc6). It should work in any distro with init.

To make service configuration aware of svn serve you will have to first copy the script to /etc/init.d and then run the following.

$ /sbin/chkconfig ---add svnserve

Also remember to create the configuration(/etc/sysconfig/subversion) file with the following lines in it to enable threading.

OPTIONS="--threads"

You can put any options you could send to svnserve in the configuration file.

PS: here is the Init script it self for your viewing before downloading

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.d/init.d/subversion
#
# Starts the Subversion Daemon
#
# chkconfig: 2345 90 10
# description: Subversion Daemon
# processname: svnserve
# pidfile: /var/lock/subsys/svnserve

source /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

[ -x /usr/bin/svnserve ] || exit 1

### Default variables
SYSCONFIG="/etc/sysconfig/subversion"

### Read configuration
[ -r "$SYSCONFIG" ] && source "$SYSCONFIG"

RETVAL=0
prog="svnserve"
desc="Subversion Daemon"
pidfile="/var/run/$prog.pid"

start() {
echo -n $"Starting $desc ($prog): "
daemon $prog -d $OPTIONS --pid-file $pidfile
RETVAL=$?
if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
touch /var/lock/subsys/$prog
fi
echo
}

obtainpid() {
pidstr=`pgrep $prog`
pidcount=`awk -v name="$pidstr" 'BEGIN{split(name,a," "); print length(a)}'`
if [ ! -r "$pidfile" ] && [ $pidcount -ge 2 ]; then
pid=`awk -v name="$pidstr" 'BEGIN{split(name,a," "); print a[1]}'`
echo $prog is already running and it was not started by the init script.
fi
}

stop() {
echo -n $"Shutting down $desc ($prog): "
if [ -r "$pidfile" ]; then
pid=`cat $pidfile`
kill -s 3 $pid
RETVAL=$?
else
RETVAL=1
fi
[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && success || failure
echo
if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$prog
rm -f $pidfile
fi
return $RETVAL
}

restart() {
stop
start
}

forcestop() {
echo -n $"Shutting down $desc ($prog): "

kill -s 3 $pid
RETVAL=$?
[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && success || failure
echo
if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$prog
rm -f $pidfile
fi

return $RETVAL
}

status() {
if [ -r "$pidfile" ]; then
pid=`cat $pidfile`
fi
if [ $pid ]; then
echo "$prog (pid $pid) is running..."
else
echo "$prog is stopped"
fi
}

obtainpid

case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
restart
RETVAL=$?
;;
condrestart)
[ -e /var/lock/subsys/$prog ] && restart
RETVAL=$?
;;
status)
status
;;
forcestop)
forcestop
;;
*)
echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|forcestop|restart|condrestart|status}"
RETVAL=1
esac

exit $RETVAL