Alexander Mikhailian

Remember the standard structure of Subversion repositories? The one that you create with mkdir project/{trunk,tags,branches}? I now figured why people create so few branches and tags in this configuration. Because they checkout at project/trunk level and not at project level by fear of getting essentially the same code multiple times. And if you are at project/trunk, you can't really work with project/branches or project/tags easily.

But there's a solution! Use the --depth and --set-depth options to svn checkout and svn update commands. For instance, when checking out a repository, do it in two steps. First, checkout only the {trunk, tags, branches} folders, but nothing below them:

svn co --depth immediates http://example.com/svn/project

then, change to project/trunk and get the rest of the codebase from trunk:

cd project/trunk
svn up --set-depth infinity

See how it helps? You can now cherry-pick only the branches you want. And get rid of them by setting depth back to immediates

Try not to make it political or bring in the discussion on civil war. I was just playing around with Facebook stats for advertisers and found that 81.3% of Ukrainians use Facebook in Russian. Anyone who published ads on Facebook can check it themselves in the Ad Manager. BTW, 92.86% of Belarusians use Facebook in Russian. And there's no "Belarusian" among language choices there, so the rest should be covered by English and a fraction of a percent for Polish.

Whenever a team starts working on a new Drupal-based website, there's an inevitable discussion on how to organize collaboration. Three questions come up regularly:

1. How and when to use Features, Features Extra and Features Override modules
2. How to organize production, testing and development environments and where to develop — on a shared server or locally
3. How to share source code.

Out of the three, the question of the source code is the most contentious. One reason is that while everyone and their friends are already on git, most of the teams that implement Drupal websites do not really need a version control system where developers can cherry-pick and merge changes or analyze bugs by navigating commit histories. Instead, teams are usually interested in incremental backup systems where each team member can be sure that he can roll back his own and other people's changes until everything works again.

Below is the inventory of ways to share source code in Drupal projects.

Incremental backup

Incremental backup with drush

One way of ensuring incremental backups without the overhead of git or other version control system is to use drush. Drush keeps a backup of previous module versions in ~/drush-backups — there is enough info to revert manually to the previously known good state. This setup is ideal for small projects with a handful of custom modules that can be kept in their own git repositories.

When in doubt, don't put your Drupal project in git. Use drush and its build-in backup mechanism.

If the only thing that keeps you from closing your Google Account is Calendar, here's the solution: setup your own CalDav server. I've chosen radicale. The setup is easy, but pam support is broken in Debian wheezy, so I had to fix it the following way:

.
# get the pypi installer
apt-get install python-stdeb
patch <<EOF
--- /usr/bin/pypi-install.ori   2014-05-11 21:32:24.884512975 +0200
+++ /usr/bin/pypi-install       2014-05-10 20:23:34.427058833 +0200
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
 
 USER_AGENT = 'pypi-install/0.6.0+git ( http://github.com/astraw/stdeb )'
 
-def find_tar_gz(package_name, pypi_url = 'http://python.org/pypi',verbose=0):
+def find_tar_gz(package_name, pypi_url = 'http://pypi.python.org/pypi',verbose=0):
     transport = xmlrpclib.Transport()
     transport.user_agent = USER_AGENT
     pypi = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy(pypi_url, transport=transport)
EOF
# install the latest pam library from pypi
pypi-install  pam
patch <<EOF--- /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/radicale/acl/PAM.py.ori    2014-05-11 21:35:36.441065840 +0200
+++ /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/radicale/acl/PAM.py        2014-05-10 20:27:12.771722350 +0200
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
 
     # Check whether the group exists
     try:
-        members = grp.getgrnam(GROUP_MEMBERSHIP)
+        members = grp.getgrnam(GROUP_MEMBERSHIP)[3]
     except KeyError:
         log.LOGGER.debug(
             "The PAM membership required group (%s) doesn't exist" %
EOF
apt-mark hold python-pam
apt-get install radicale

There's been quite a few spam{bots,turks} lately passing through Drupal Captcha , reCAPTHA, Honeypot module… After a bit of research, I decided to block China from accessing my site. It turned out to be easy:

# install geoip filter into iptables
apt-get install xtables-addons-common
# download the existing geoip database
/usr/lib/xtables-addons/xt_geoip_dl
# set up csv parser in perl
apt-get install libtext-csv-xs-perl
# create a directory for geoip filter's database
mkdir /usr/share/xt_geoip
# build the database
/usr/lib/xtables-addons/xt_geoip_build  -D /usr/share/xt_geoip  *.csv
# load the geoip filter module
modprobe xt_geoip
# block China
iptables -A INPUT -m geoip --src-cc CN -j DROP

PROFIT!!!

P.S. Next in sight is US. US an CH account for 97% of Drupal spam.