Just finished installing Apache - or - further evidence that I might be a communist

I’ve been called a communist already on my current project for making Firefox my default browser (I guess my current project is for Microsoft, so they might be biased). To add further fuel to the allegations of rampant communism I just finished installing Apache on my laptop…what gives? Am I giving up System.Web.IHttpHandler for some Perl and duct-tape? Not likely. The reason I set up Apache was for Subversion. My Subversion repository is hosted on my laptop, but at the moment I’m doing most of my “work” (as in fun at home out of hours mucking around with stuff work) inside VPCs. When you’re doing everything locally using a file:// based URL to your subversion repository is fine, but when you’re in a VPC you either end up copying files between the host system, or using file shares between the two, meaning less commits and more chance of losing work. My intention from the outset was not to install Apache (subversion can leverage the web-dav stuff in apache to make your repositories available via HTTP, and this is kind of the default setup for subversion in a networked environment). I thought Apache would be more “heavy weight” than the other alternative - a lightweight service/daemon called svnserve that is included with SVN. Alarm bells should have started going off when I noticed in the SVN FAQ that to run as a service under windows you need to run SVNServe inside a seperate EXE like this one (which is not part of the “standard“ SVN windows install). Hmmm…sounds like I might be wandering off the well-trod path of easy painless version control. After a little while setting this up (looks like the path to the repository should NOT end with a / character) I was able to get stuff from my repository remotely, but unable to update (after several Reads of The Friendly Manual). This was a little disappointing since it was the first time since I started using Subversion about 2 years ago that it hasn’t “just worked”. I could have probably persevered for longer with this, but I’ve run Apache before so I was not too afraid of setting it up. Much less time later I have Apache 2 up and running, and mod_dav_svn serving up my subversion repository to VPCs and anybody else on my local subnet. I’d be interested to know how other people run their version control systems in mult-machine virtual environments. VSTS is going to be too heavy-weight…WinCVS works but….SourceSafe is not something I would ever voluntarily use….SVN looks like a good option here.

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