Free Subversion Book

For a limited time receive a copy of Mike Mason’s new ebook Pragmatic Guide to Subversion with your paid Bugzilla Hosting, MantisBT Hosting or Subversion Hosting subscription!

The Pragmatic Guide to Subversion presents 48 essential tasks for your Subversion success. Stripping away the exhaustive details of reference books, this guide gives you a shortcut to the Subversion master’s recommended set of best practices. With this book, you can get to the good parts quickly, and be more productive and effective.

Subversion sets the standard in version control systems. Championed by open-source developers, Subversion is behind some of today’s biggest and most important software, including Apache, FreeBSD, Ruby, and MediaWiki. But more than just a tool for open-source collaboration, Subversion has made a significant impact in the corporate IT world. Most developers will now encounter Subversion source control during their career.

As a developer, you probably have knowledge of more than one source control tool and are expected to fluidly switch between tools depending on where you are working. This book was written to bridge the gap between knowing something about version control in general and knowing about Subversion specifically.

In Pragmatic Guide to Subversion, author Mike Mason drives developers to the features and practices that have made Subversion so successful. Each of the 48 tasks selected for the book is presented as a quick two-pager, with a succinct description on the left side and a quick reference on the right. The book is designed for experienced developers who know how to learn and want to get straight to the tricks and traps they’d otherwise learn by trial and error.

Subversion started life as a command-line tool but graphical clients are now extremely popular and can offer a lot of extra power. For every task in Pragmatic Guide to Subversion, you get to see how to carry out the task via the regular command-line client as well as the TortoiseSVN graphical client for Windows, and the Cornerstone graphical client for Mac.

Whether or not you’ve used other version control tools, you’ll learn Subversion’s popular way of working-how to access your source code, make changes, and share them with your team. Each of the development tasks selected for the book gives simple steps toward completion, paired with a clear explanation.

You won’t find a more practical approach to learning Subversion than Pragmatic Guide to Subversion.

New MantisBT Management Page

While MantisBT is a great bug tracker, there are a number of settings that aren’t available in the standard user interface. Typically you need access to the config_inc.php file on the server. Rather than make you learn PHP there is a new management page available from your settings page:

Click the “Manage Global Settings” link and you’ll see the new options you can control.
Allow Signup controls the ability of end users to request a MantisBT account on your system. This is turned off by default.
The various email settings apply in different places around the system.
You may want to change the “From” and “Return Path” settings to your email so you are notified when messages bounce and your users can get a hold of you easier.
Thanks and let me know of any other settings you’d like to see here.

Subversion Hosting Now Available

devZing.com is proud to announce the release of our Subversion Hosting plan. Like all our other plans it features 1 Gb disk space, unlimited repositories, unlimited users in each repository, a simple interface for creating repositories and managing users, and daily off-site backups.

The Subversion only price is a low $2.50/month. However, you can bundle Subversion with Bugzilla Hosting or MantisBT Hosting for only $10/month.

Our 14 day free trial will let you get a feel for our service and let you get everything setup at no cost – no credit card required! Go ahead, give it a try.

Localized Versions of Bugzilla Now Available

devZing is pleased to announce that a variety of localizations are now available with our hosted service. We currently provide:

  • Bulgarian (Български език)
  • Czech (Čeština)
  • German (Deutsch)
  • Spanish (Español)
  • French (Français)
  • Japanese (日本語)
  • Russian (Русский)
  • Simplified Chinese (中文)
  • Traditional Chinese (繁體中文)

Please contact support@devZing.com if you want to add one of these localizations to your hosted Bugzilla service.

How To Delete Bugs in Bugzilla

A regular questions that comes up regarding Bugzilla is: “How do I delete bugs in Bugzilla?”

The standard answer is that you don’t and you shouldn’t. They usually give good reasons like maintaining history etc. However, there are certainly times (although infrequent) when it is appropriate to delete a bug.

There are some administrative settings you will most like have to change before you can delete a bug. (note: I am referring to Bugzilla 3.4.6) Log in with an account belonging to the admin group and navigate to the Administration page. Then go to the Parameters page. Finally choose the Administrative Policies link. (Administration -> Parameters -> Administrative Policies)

Now you will see the allowbugdeletion parameter which is most likely set to off unless you’ve been fiddling with it while trying to delete a bug. Change the parameter to on and click Save Changes. There is a key hint in the description of this parameter.

The pages to edit products and components can delete all associated bugs when you delete a product (or component). Since that is a pretty scary idea, you have to turn on this option before any such deletions will ever happen.

Note the bolded phrase.  You can’t directly delete bugs, you must assign a bug to a component or product and delete it. This bears repeating – you cannot delete a bug directly.

The easiest way is to create a component in the product with the bugs you want to delete. Call it “Trash” or something equally descriptive. Now find the bugs you want to delete and change their component to “Trash”.

Once you have added all the soon to be deleted bugs to your trash component go back to the component list in the administration page (Administration -> Products -> <your product> -> Edit Components). You should see an “Action” column on the far right of the table with all your components with a Delete link. Find your trash component and click the associated “Delete” link.

You will be presented with a confirmation page with a big red warning telling you how many bugs will be deleted. You can view the bug list to verify or just click the “Yes delete” button.

Your bugs are now deleted.

You will most like want to turn the allowbugdeletion parameter off again to prevent accidents.

MantisBT Upgraded to 1.2.0

There are many new features added to 1.2.0, including:

  • Global categories available to all projects, as well as project categories inheriting from parent projects to child projects; both are optional
  • Tracked change history for textarea fields (Description, etc) and bug notes
  • Customizable sets of columns for View Issues page and export formats
  • Combined simple and advanced views into a single, configurable view that allows selecting exactly what fields to show or hide
  • Improved roadmap and changelog pages, including version release dates, and permalinks to individual versions
  • Marking versions as obsolete to hide them from the roadmap and changelog
  • More configuration options for rebranding MantisBT installations
  • Improved support for UTF-8 localizations and content
  • Implemented custom search providers for Firefox and Internet Explorer
  • Implemented localized timestamps using according to user-preferred timezones

Full Changelog

 No Hassle Open Source Project Management Hosting