Friday, August 20, 2010

Collabnet Subversion Edge vs. Trac!

My team uses both Subversion and Trac, accessed through Apache, in its daily routine. Having read about CollabNet Subversion Edge (CSE from now on), a Subversion Server plus a nice management console, I was eager to try it but also a bit wary, since as any experienced sysadmin (not that I'm one of those) will tell you: "Change is good, you go first!".
Two things were troubling me: the embedded Apache server and
Python 2.5 that CSE uses and enforces, but the one that brought havoc to my setup was the second.
I downloaded the setup, run it, and a second instance of Apache appeared in my Apache Monitor, green as an emerald! So far so good, I fired up the admin console of CSE and it was great, simple to use, complete also with some nice graphs depicting your SVN Server usage.
Next I checked up how my Trac was, and all I could get was a 500 Http Error while establishing the connection to my old Apache Server.
Time to check the error log, from which I recoiled in horror:

Fri Aug 20 08:47:33 2010] [error] make_obcallback: could not import mod_python.apache.\n


[Fri Aug 20 08:47:33 2010] [error] make_obcallback: Python path being used "['C:\\\\programmi\\\\python25\\\\lib\\\\site-packages', 'C:\\\\WINDOWS\\\\system32\\\\python25.zip', '', 'C:\\\\Programmi\\\\Apache Group\\\\Apache2\\\\bin']".


[Fri Aug 20 08:47:33 2010] [error] get_interpreter: no interpreter callback found.


[Fri Aug 20 08:47:33 2010] [error] [client 10.0.30.87] python_handler: Can't get/create interpreter.



So, to make a long story short, the Python 2.5 installation embedded in CSE folder conflicted with my system-wide Python installation and I couldn't find I way to reconcile the two. As far as I could understand, I could have redirected the python-path stored in the registry to my installation, but I would have lost the possibility of using CSE's ViewVC, the repository viewer: not a great loss, since Trac supplies a more than adequate substitute. What troubled me more was the maintainability of the solution: perhaps, at every (automatic) update of CSE, I had to repeat the same procedure of modifing the registry. At the end of the day, I uninistalled CSE, even if I consider it a worthwhile solution for the ease of configuration that brings to a Subversion installation.

2 comments:

  1. Did you reboot the server after installing CSE?

    The following FAQ isn't *exactly* like your problem, but I'm just curious if the solution would help, for similar reasons:

    http://bit.ly/acWCvD

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  2. Hi Adam, thank you for the information. Yes, I rebooted the server, but it was useless. Reading the FAQ, I have noticed that it refers to ActiveState Python, while the python version that's installed on my server is the one that you get from python.org.
    Moreover, I hadn't any problem with ViewVC, unless I tried to use my version of python. Switching instead on CSE's version of python, I had error 500 on my TRAC...deadlock! :(
    Thank you again for your time.

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