Well, it's finally raining in the Bay Area. Soon, there will be enough snow in the Sierras to make my recent ski gear purchase worthwhile. I can't believe that it's taken this long for winter to finally arrive -- fire warnings and 80+ degree weather at the end of November is unnerving. Global warming at it's finest.

On the technical front, I'm anticipating the release of Subversion 1.3. I have been building and testing out the release candidates for the last month or so, and things are looking good so far. The current Blastwave Subversion packages use neon 0.24.x for WebDAV, but when I release the 1.3 packages, we'll bump to 0.25.4. One of the best improvements in neon between 0.24 and 0.25 is interruptability. If you've ever started a svn up operation on a huge repository, and then changed your mind, you'll know what this change will bring. Right now, pressing Ctrl-C to interrupt a long running svn client operation has no effect until the server responds. With neon 0.25, pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the operation immediately, removing one of the biggest annoyances from the svn command line client, IMHO.

Even better, there was an announcement this week that Google has awarded an internship to Justin Erenkrantz (of ASF fame) to work on Subversion. His primary project will be to develop the SERF WebDAV library, and integrate it with Subversion. While neon works fine for Subversion at the moment, it's usage within Subversion implements a protocol on top of WebDAV, defeating some valuable features of WebDAV. For instance, rather than using simple HTTP GET requests for most data, the client and server speak using custom REPORT requests. One downside to this is that proxy cache servers cannot cache REPORT operations, which limits the usefulness of caching to improve the speed of repository operations (e.g. cached diffs). Current plans are to have this functionality integrated in time for SERF to be a compile (or run) time option by the 1.4 release.