Collabnet no longer available...

Please post all questions on Help+Manual 8 here

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

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JigsawTrading
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2022 10:07 am

Collabnet no longer available...

Unread post by JigsawTrading »

Hello

I am getting the message

"Your project "E:\daytradr manual\JigsawTrading\JigsawTrading.hmxp" is under SVN version control. The newer Tortoise SVN client installed on your system requires the additional installation of the Collabnet SVN command line client. This Collabnet client must have the same version number as your version of Tortoise for Help+Manual to be able to interact with the SVN system correctly."

The problem is that it appears Collabnet no longer exists. The link is on here: https://www.helpandmanual.com/news/2016 ... toise-svn/

and tells us to download from here:

https://www.collab.net/downloads/svn-other

Which takes us to a completely different page: https://digital.ai/agility

So now, we appear to be stuck.

Can you help?

Peter
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Tim Green
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Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
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Re: Collabnet no longer available...

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Peter,

This is a new and annoying situation. The background is that SVN is falling out of favor because everyone is switching to Git (including Microsoft), and companies like Collabnet that built their platforms on it are increasingly going out of business. As far as we can see, Collabnet has now merged with a couple of other companies, but their SVN offerings have been completely removed from the Internet. We are going to have to see if we can make their version of the 32-bit runtimes available directly, but the rights situation is likely to be fraught, and they are still only 1.11.1, while SVN is currently on 1.14.

Before we can make a better solution available, you have the following options:

1) Use SVN passively:
To do this, turn off SVN support in View > Program Options > Subversion. Then you can install the latest versions of Subversion and Tortoise. Your users then need to perform an update on their project folder with Tortoise before they start work to get the latest changes from the server, and a commit with Tortoise after work to merge their changes with the server version.

2) Downgrade to SVN and Tortoise 1.9.1:
This works fine out of the box, because everything needed for Help+Manual is still there. If you are only using SVN for Help+Manual projects it is the best solution, because it works without any additional settings or changes. It is the last version of Tortoise that still included the 32-bit runtimes. You will need to get the 1.9.1 server version from the distribution you are using, and you can get the 1.9.1 version of Tortoise here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tortoisesvn/files/

3) Switch to Git now:
Support for Git is coming in the next version of Help+Manual, but you can already use it passively on Help+Manual projects, in the same way as any other modern version control system. Here too, your users need to perform an update with Git before working ("pull" in Git terminology) and a commit after working ("add" + "commit" + "push" in Git terminology).

The huge benefit of Git, in addition to its speed and extreme reliability, is that it doesn't need any server software. It is peer-to-peer by design, and every Git user has the entire repository and could theoretically be the "central repository". There are several excellent server options available:
  • You can store the central copy of your repository free of charge and privately on GitHub or BitBucket, and use their tools to manage the connection with your local working copies.
  • You can store the central copy of your repository directly on your own Internet server, provided that your server supports SSH connections. You then set up your users with SSH key pairs for accessing the repository folder, and Git communication goes directly without any password requests.
Help+Manual 9 is going to solve the problem by externalizing version control. It also adds support for Git and removes support for Microsoft's defunct Team Foundation Server, which Microsoft themselves are now abandoning in favor of Git (Github is now a Microsoft service).

Instead of interfacing directly with the DLLs of the various version control systems, which was a disproportionately huge amount of development work for very small real benefits, we are switching to interfacing with the open scripting APIs instead. The scripts used will be directly available, and it makes adding support for additional version control systems easier. This means that there will no longer be the overlay icons in the table contents showing the version control status of each topic, but we believe this is worth it for the great gain in flexibility.

If you are interested in trying this out, you can write to Alexander Halser at sales AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @ )and ask to participate in the beta program.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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