svn,externals.

Subversion Externals Definitions, yet another nice Subversion feature.

In our rails app we make use of the engines and more specific the login_engine, plugins. Now, if you follow the rails-news a bit you’ve probably heard of the security issue not so long ago.

These patches (and 1.1.6) will break applications using the 3rd party engines idea.

I can tell you for sure, it was broken. When I started building the app I downloaded and extracted the engines in the plugins directory, so I had no idea (anymore) which version we were using at that time.

svn:externals to the rescue

I knew about externals from typo, but I never really looked into it. Until now.

An externals definition is a mapping of a local directory to the URL—and possibly a particular revision—of a versioned resource. [more]

Externals? Cool. How?

svn propedit --editor-cmd gvim svn:externals vendor/plugins

The line above fires up gvim where I entered the following lines:

engines http://svn.rails-engines.org/plugins/engines
login_engine http://svn.rails-engines.org/plugins/login_engine

This will ensure that we always have the latest version of the plugins whenever we run svn up. So now we follow engines-trunk for a while, until we decide to link to a particular version. We then only have to modify the svn urls accordingly.