There’s sort of a point to this article, but it may take me a few paragraphs. Feh, isn’t blogging great? I could write an appropriately structured article, but since I am the lone editor here, I can also conduct a non-quite stream-of-conciousness discourse, then, at the last possible moment, suddenly introduce a thesis. And you say, thanks for that meandering and irrelevant comment.

For those of you using subversion for version control, particularly for your rails applications, Collaboa is a useful tool. It includes repository browsing and a ticket system for projects stored in subversion, and is a rails application. Functionally, it’s similar to trac, but since I’m accustomed to rails, Collaboa is a better resource for me.

In reference to the title, there have actually been a couple of forks of Collaboa.

• Titra, if I remember right, was forked in order to add in time tracking features. I’ve never tried it.
• Retrospectiva is a fork created a month or two ago, with some different design goals, I guess.

Anyway, probably all three are good tools, although Collaboa is what I use for lack of any pressing reason to switch.

One issue that interests me is that none of these projects aim to provide a functionality like sourceforge, rubyforge or Google code, that is to provide the functionality for multiple, disassociated projects (To clarify, at least Collaboa has multiple projects support, but it’s a web application that organizations install and use, rather than a web service hosting multiple projects. Right, if that made sense.). Another thing I’ve noticed is how projects hosted by these large web service sites tend to have much less attractive and functional repository browsing than that offered by the above projects.

Okay, actually approaching the point. Despite telling myself I should do so, I haven’t contributed anything to Collaboa. However, I did get the bug this week to start playing around with a rails project interacting with a subversion repository. Collaboa uses Subversion bindings for ruby via SWIG (or that’s my understanding) to interact with a repository on the local machine. I wanted (for fun) to set up to interact with a remote repository via svn-serve. Once I found the protocol specification it was quite simple, by which I mean, I had no idea what I was doing. But, over the past couple of days, I’ve learned a lot about Ruby’s TCPSocket library, and about Subversion. The code I’ve written can actually do a directory listing now. So, it’s been a lot of fun, and maybe I can release it someday. I think I saw that Collaboa will soon have the repository interaction abstracted, so other repository types can be used, so maybe this will be something I can contribute. We’ll see, eh?