RabbitVCS

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve (finally) finished packaging RabbitVCS 0.13.1 for Debian and Ubuntu! As always, the best way to obtain it is by adding our PPA to your software sources — follow the instructions there for your particular distribution. If you download it from the Google Code downloads page, note that there is a different core package depending on what distribution you use, but the other components should be the same from Ubuntu Hardy to Lucid and Debian Squeeze and Sid.

Remember:

• you still need to install the core and an appropriate extension, eg. rabbitvcs-core and rabbitvcs-nautilus for the Nautilus extension.
• Nautilus users should restart Nautilus or log out and back in for the new extension to be loaded

If there are any problems at all, please send an email to the general discussion list or file an issue with the Google Code issue tracker.

What Took So Long?

The dedicated amongst you may have noticed that I took an entire week getting this packaged and released. Well, the problem was that with 0.13, we decided to split out our upstream tarball to make it easier for users to install only what they need. However, we soon realised that:

1. 99% of the tarball was taken up by the core, and
2. we never really change the core or extensions independently anyway, and
3. it’s a bloody pain

…so there wasn’t really any great gain to be had from that. In 0.13.1 we changed back to having a single “upstream” tarball, but still wanted to split out the various extensions and it was this detail that took me a while to figure out. From now on the tarball and the packages should be released at the same time.

RabbitVCS now in Debian

In other news, RabbitVCS has been accepted into the official Debian distribution. Debian users have the choice of using our PPA (I recommend following Lucid if you do), or simply waiting the extra 10 days for it to trickle into the testing distro (unless you use Sid, of course). One upshot of this is that it’s likely it will now make its way into the official Ubuntu repos too. Both of these events will make it much easier for new users of Debian and Ubuntu to find RabbitVCS.

As an aside, getting RabbitVCS into Debian was the reason I first got involved with this project in the first place, so it’s nice for me that it’s finally happened :)