[rt-users] CommitBit, a new toy from the makers of RT

Jesse Vincent jesse at bestpractical.com
Thu Oct 5 00:52:15 EDT 2006


We've been opening up our code a bit lately. I know that sounds weird  
coming from an open source company, but we've traditionally been  
very, very cautious with who gets a "commit bit" to our products.   
Only two or three people outside Best Practical have commit rights to  
RT.  SVK has a richer cast of characters.  With Jifty, we've fully  
embraced Audrey Tang's methodology. When she's feeling  
confrontational, she calls it "Anarchistic Development." When she's  
talking to folks with a more Web 2.0 bent, she calls it "Wiki Style  
Development".  Just about anybody who shows up has commit privileges  
thrust upon them.  It's worked amazingly well for Pugs. So we figured  
we'd try it for Jifty.

If we were hosting Jifty somewhere like SourceForge or Google Code,  
we could just add people by email address and the system would take  
care of sending them email, getting them a password and so on.  We  
really prefer to host things locally, which left us in a bit of a  
vacuum. We couldn't find a single good tool for handing out commit  
bits and managing projects in a Subversion repository.

I bet you can tell where this is going.
We've got another new project.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please allow me to present CommitBit, a  
subversion access management system with built in support for a  
"code.example.com" style project directory.

CommitBit lets you, the administrator, set up repositories and  
projects through a simple web interface. You can grant an individual   
a commit or admin bit to a specific project just by typing his or her  
email address into CommitBit's web ui.  Project administrators can,  
somewhat unsurprisingly, grant commit or admin bits to others through  
the same interface.  CommitBit takes care of notifying the new  
project member, setting up their password and so on.

On the backend, CommitBit can set up new subversion repositories or  
work with preexisting local repositories. It manages a bunch of files  
so you don't have to:

     * htpasswd files for svn over WebDAV
     * passwd files for svnserve
     * authz files that work with both
     * an apache2 configuration snippet

On the "codedot" side, you a project listing, the ability to  
spotlight whatever's currently hot and per-project overview pages  
with lists of committers, pointers to your bug tracker, wiki, mailing  
lists, Subversion repository, repository browser and so on.

If you're interested in CommitBit, you can find out more about it at  
code.bestpractical.com:

http://code.bestpractical.com/project/CommitBit

Best,

Jesse

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