After converting my account, it asks for a password when committing, and I don’t know what to give in. Help?
The point here is that the svn switch command we have given you has not been completed successfully. Unfortunately svn does not tell you that. What you need to do is run svn info and see what the URL is. In most cases the problem is that the username is not in the URL. So you need to use the following command: svn switch –relocate https://svn.kde.org svn+ssh://username@svn.kde.org

The first argument after –relocate must match the URL found in the svn info command.

You have failed to setup my account properly, it closes the connection as soon as I try to commit anything.
Yeah, another nice uninformative error message. The problem is that you have an offending key for svn.kde.org in you known hosts file. Try doing ’ssh username@svn.kde.org’. If that result in something that looks like garbage, it is ok. Else it will give an error message which shows which line in your .ssh/known_hosts is offending. Remove that line and try again.

Note, only remove that line if you run into this problem right after conversion, if you are already using ssh based svn and get this error suddenly, chances are high there is a man in the middle attack.

Is rsa better than dsa?
Google for that one :)

I use git-svn, can I convert my existing checkout?
Hmwah, yes, you can, but it is not straight forward. Some followed this tutorial with success. You should use svn+ssh://username@svn.kde.org/home/kde format as the new url. We have a sysadmin bugreport with some more detailed information. We can subscribe you when you want, just let us know on #kde-sysadmin.

Can I use multiple ssh keys for my svn account?
Yes You Can. Just file a sysadmin bugreport at this location. Make sure your bugzilla login matches your email address in the kde-common/accounts though.

Can I use the same ssh key on multiple computers?
Yes You Can. Please note that when copying your key files, you must make sure the permissions are exactly identical to the place you copied it from. Making your private key world readable and writable makes ssh refuse to use that key.

We are busy converting password based subversion accounts to ssh based ones. The benefit of doing that is that you automatically get access to the KDE Git repository. As KDE is moving to Git, we need to either convert the password based accounts or disable them.

In the past 24 hours we have sent out mails to 1210 subversion account holders which use a password. Of those roughly 150 have replied to the invitation. Roughly 100 replied with their ssh key, 1 with his gpg key and about 50 replied that they want to close their account.

That might seem like a high number of people closing their account, but seeing it into perspective of the total accounts we have, and considering nobody gives up his or her account usually, I think it is actually a very nice number.

The 100 we converted were all converted instantly, nobody had to wait, which is a great achievement. Ah, Ben just asked me to take over, so this blog needs to be ended now. The work is comparable with creating new accounts, so we still need to actually do something for each developer that wants to convert.

What I wanted to say is, that if you have not received an invitation to convert, please go to this page and re-request your invitation. If you still don’t receive it, check if your email address is correct in the accounts file. If not, adapt it there, and re-request the invitation in a day or so.

If you have any questions, jump into #kde-sysadmin irc channel or file a sysadmin bugreport here.

Oh, backlog building up…. Bye!

We are now approaching the password based accounts directly. Everyone receives an invitation to convert. We send them out in managable batches, and we expect the last batch to go out later this weekend. We still have roughly 1200 accounts which need conversion.

Approaching everyone individually also means for some account holders a flash back to the times they were active for KDE. They could have been inactive for years already, as we never ‘clean’ svn accounts automatically based on inactivity.

If you are inactive you can also indicate that on the form, your account will be disabled and we will no longer spam you in the future to convert your account. So, if you want to pro-actively help us, feel free to go to this page and fill in your svn account name. You will receive instructions in your mailbox within seconds.

To streamline your move to git, you will have to convert your svn account from https (if you are using that) to svn+ssh by providing us with your ssh public key. If you do that, you will automatically get write access to the git repositories. If you already have a svn+ssh account, there is nothing you need to do right now.

To facilitate the move from password to ssh based accounts, we have created a special page where you can request the conversion.

Please note that if you are behind a firewall, which blocks port 22, you should not convert your account at this moment. We are working on a solution!

svndiff () { svn diff "$*" | colordiff | less; }

When you now run svndiff where you would normally run svn diff you get a nice diff in colors (which is pretty addictive) and it uses less as a pager, so no need for the | less anymore…

To get rid of the duplication of maintaining the script in each of my projects, I just generalized it a bit and moved it to kdesdk/scripts so everyone can use it. Just run in from the folder you want the changelog in. Optionally add a parameter to a subfolder if you only want the changes from that folder.

How it works? It’s simple:

extragear/pim/mailody$ svn2log.sh
Fetching committers...                                  
Creating changelog...
[...]

extragear/pim/mailody$ svn diff ChangeLog | diffstat
 ChangeLog | 1911 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------------
 1 file changed, 1275 insertions(+), 636 deletions(-)

extragear/pim/mailody$ head ChangeLog

2009-09-19 13:43 +0000 [r1025714]  Christophe Giboudeaux [..]@gmail.com

 * trunk/extragear/pim/mailody/CMakeLists.txt: Coding style + Remove
 the REQUIRED keyword

2009-09-19 13:26 +0000 [r1025707]  Christophe Giboudeaux [..]gmail.com

 * trunk/extragear/pim/mailody/kontact/CMakeLists.txt: Cleanup

Hope this is usefull for others.