SVN::Web and Google Code Hosting

You're probably aware of Google's code hosting service. They use Subversion as their revision control system, so if you want to contribute to a project hosted there you really need a Subversion client.

I was reading the FAQ for the hosting service the other day and a particular entry struck me.

Do you have support for ViewVC or similar repository-browsing tools?

This feature isn't implemented yet, but you can still browse the latest version of your project's code by entering the repository URL into a web browser.

Since SVN::Web now supports (well, it does on my development site, which will be released as 0.50 real soon now) accessing remote repositories, it should be pretty easy to have it talk to the repositories hosted at Google.

A minor wrinkle is that SVN::Web expects to be configured with a list of available repositories. But that's only a small code change to solve. So I've done that, and put together a proof-of-concept SVN::Web installation.

The practical upshot of which is that if you have a project at Google Code Hosting, you can take this URL: http://jc.ngo.org.uk:81/svnweb/, append the name of your project, and get a decent web interface on to your repository.

For example, the Reconstructor project (chosen at random) gets this URL: http://jc.ngo.org.uk:81/svnweb/reconstructor.

This is very definitely a proof of concept, and may well disappear if it gets completely hammered, and/or starts sucking up all my hosted bandwidth.