Pressflow-6 and Pantheon-Mercury on GitHub (updated x2)

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In the past year I've discovered two things:

  • The revision management system Bazaar (aka "bzr") is an occasionally flaky little thing and I've experienced several crashes doing mundane tasks. I much prefer using Git or even Subversion as they've proven to be rock solid in my use of them over the years.
  • The Drupal fork Pressflow has a lot going for it.

However, because Pressflow uses Bazaar rather than Git I've been reluctant to bother trying it. Now that I'm working somewhere that is starting to use Pressflow for production sites I figured it was time to get over the headaches and start contributing.

As my first step towards this goal I've set up what I'm intending to be a semi-permanent mirror of Pressflow-6 on GitHub. While there were two existing mirrors neither of them had been updated yet, so now at least there is an up-to-date mirror of it available. In doing this I am committing to keeping this current for as long as I am using Drupal 6 for work, which should continue through 2011 and probably longer.

I'm also going to see if I can get involved a bit more with the Pressflow group, possibly throw some ideas learned during my days at Bonnier to help improve Drupal 6's performance for high-traffic sites, especially for logged-in users.

One of the most common uses of Pressflow is as part of the larger Pantheon Mercury project, which is a custom OS configuration for making installations of Linux tailored specially for running Pressflow, complete with a reverse-proxy engine and a local install of the Solr search engine. At Bluespark Labs we're standardizing on using this as the basis for all new production installations so it's in my best interests to know how it works and, potentially, contribute to the effort. So, like with Pressflow, my first step towards this is to create a GitHub mirror of the Pantheon project, which I'll try to keep current.

Update: You can also access the repository using Subversion, which can be useful to e.g. use svn:externals to save some steps when updating:

  • svn checkout http://svn.github.com/damienmckenna/pressflow-6.git

Update x2: FourKitchens, one of the leaders in the Pressflow group, have announced their own official git and svn mirrors of the bzr repository:

5 Comments

Nice work, as a Git user and

Nice work, as a Git user and someone who uses Pressflow and Mercury this was always a pain for me as well. I'm hoping that Pressflow and Mercury might move their repos to Git once Drupal.org officially moves off CVS.

Cheers,
Sean Bannister

thanks for filing a bug

thanks for filing a bug report against the bzr project. i am just a bzr user but even so your flippant condescending attitude towards a far more friendly tool than git is frustrating.

Chx, unfortunately I had a

Chx, unfortunately I had a system crash before I could report a bug so lost the terminal buffer & command history, I'll see if I can reproduce them. Just to repeat what I've previously tweeted - a tool like this shouldn't *crash* using the out-of-the-box python binary on OSX doing basic actions (code checkout, local commit, upstream push), in ten years of using CVS, SVN (even pre-v1.0 releases) and Git I've never had these problems.

hmm, been using bazaar for

hmm, been using bazaar for over a year. its simple. forgiving. flexible. and absolutely wonderful as a web developer.

I haven't had any such crashes. although it does make me wonder if you were using a bzr plugin? i have used the *upload* plugin which makes pushing changes (or specific revisions) via ftp to "dumb" hosts (e.g., host without ssh access or a bzr repository, etc) a life savor on many occasions - this plugin however is less than perfect. I suspect there are others.

I am happy to see drupal moving to distributed version control. and I'm glad bzr offers tools to easily work with git repositories. but to suggest bazaar is somehow less robust or stable than git makes me wonder how projects such as Ubuntu, MySQL, Squid, GNU, Bugzilla, Inkscape, or Linux Foundation make use of software that is so unstable.

I'm going to try Pressflow-6

I'm going to try Pressflow-6 + Pantheon-Mercury. Looks very promising

When a software crashes it can depend on many things, we can't just guess without proper investigation and blame the tool! remember that softwares like Bazaar,HG,Git have many users and are actually under heavy test everyday finding a critical bug on this software is not really that easy.
I have no doubt that the three popular DVCSs are fairly stable and feature rich. The different is mostly in the architecture and the goals of each project.

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