Subversion and Wordpress (or any other 3rd party)

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infolock
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Subversion and Wordpress (or any other 3rd party)

Post by infolock »

Ok, so I've been having a discussion with my team about version control. I'm a big advocate of it, and I believe version controlling is perfect for any company. However, there is a discussion going on now about wether or not we should version control Wordpress, or any other 3rd party application for that matter.


I personally don't think so, and think it's a bad idea, a bad use of diskspace, and unnecessary overkill. To me, a 3rd party application is maintained by another group, has it's own versioning system, and should be left that way.

Granted, there are cases were versioning some of the files (like configuration files) were this may be granted, or any other custom job that you may do to the application where you would want to keep your code. But for the most part, the 3rd party app itself is maintained elsewhere, and putting it into a repository is just unnecessary.


So, my question is, what do you guys think about this?
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Benjamin
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Re: Subversion and Wordpress (or any other 3rd party)

Post by Benjamin »

What purpose would it serve? Disk space is cheap but I really don't see the point.
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RobertGonzalez
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Re: Subversion and Wordpress (or any other 3rd party)

Post by RobertGonzalez »

Externals. I live by them. Without them I would have a load of other peoples code in some repository somewhere that I would have to update manually. No way dude. Right now I can set an External property (to another repo) on a directory within my repo and it picks up the changes to the external any time I do an update on my stuff. That is just too cool, too easy and exactly how it should be done. Then the other developers can continue to manage their code and you can manage yours. And only yours.
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Ambush Commander
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Re: Subversion and Wordpress (or any other 3rd party)

Post by Ambush Commander »

If it's a mission critical open source third party application, I'd cozy up with the developers, submit a few patches and try to get commit access. Nothing beats finding a bug in software you don't maintain yet being able to see it fixed instantly.

If you're going to make extensive changes to the third party application, versioning the entire thing is indeed an option. However, I only do things like that if I'm willing to "own" the codebase, i.e. be familiar enough with it that I can change things rapidly and accurately. For large codebases like Wordpress, this is less feasible.

Here's what I'd recommend you do: build an automated patching system. Then you can check out the third-party lib with svn:externals (although if their repository is a little flaky I'd recommend simply unzipping tarballs... not that difficult, and you have fine grained control on when to update) and apply your patches to it. This is assuming that you needed to make changes to it; if no changes were necessary, the only reason I'd use svn:externals is for convenience.
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