About C. Michael Pilato

C. Michael Pilato is a core Subversion developer, co-author of Version Control With Subversion (O'Reilly Media), and the primary maintainer of ViewVC. He works remotely from his home state of North Carolina as a software engineer for CollabNet, and has been an active open source developer since early 2001. Mike is a proud husband and father who loves traveling, soccer, spending quality time with his family, and any combination of those things. He also enjoys composing and performing music, and harbors not-so-secret fantasies of rock stardom. Mike has a degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

CloudForge’s Improved Subversion Service

CloudForge News Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
June 9, 2014

The Backstory Since joining the CloudForge Development team within CollabNet nearly a year ago, several of my colleagues and I have been primarily focused on delivering improvements to the scalability and reliability of the CloudForge improved Subversion service. With tens of terabytes of live Subversion repository data being generated and used by tens of thousands of our customers, even the smallest improvements we make to the service have a pretty big impact. CloudForge was built on a strong Subversion architecture, but over the years the ever-growing number of customers put a strain on the platform. In the original architecture, customers (organizations) were …

Foreign Repository Copies

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
June 28, 2013

Some time ago, I wrote in this space about some new functionality that I had managed to work into Subversion — the ability to merge changes into a working copy from a so-called “foreign repository” (that is, a different repository than the one reflected by the working copy). I touted the feature as a lovely alternative way to manage vendor branches. I admit that I may have glossed over the details a bit in that post, but the idea seemed simple enough: import a baseline copy of the third-party codebase into your repository, and thereafter merge the changes made by …

Subversion Hackathon Berlin 2013 Wrap-up

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
June 24, 2013

The jetlag has worn off; the clothes have been unpacked from suitcases, washed, and restored to their proper places in my closet and drawers; the AC converters stuffed back into one of the many miscellaneous electronics bins in my office; and life has resumed for me on my typical side of the Atlantic Ocean. After flying back from the Subversion Hackathon in Berlin, breezing through uncharacteristically fast Passport Control and Customs lines at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, arriving in my hometown of Harrisburg, NC, and enjoying a lovely Father’s Day weekend with my immediate and extended families, last Monday began a …

Apache Subversion 1.8.0 Released

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
June 18, 2013

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) today announced the release of Apache™ Subversion® 1.8.0, which is the culmination of many months of design and development effort by a medium-sized team of committers scattered globally. As a CollabNet employee with over twelve years invested into the Subversion project myself, milestones such as this in the life of the project that CollabNet originally launched and in which myself and several of my CollabNet colleagues continue to contribute are always neat to witness. For those of us who’ve been working daily on the stabilization of the release — fixing minor buglets, reviewing the fixes …

Reducing Network Traffic in Subversion 1.8

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
October 24, 2012

This post discusses Apache Subversion features which are available in the development codebase at the time of writing but which have not yet been published in an official release and may change prior to such a release. I’ve made neither apologies about nor attempts to hide the fact that I adore Subversion’s sparse checkouts functionality. The moment that feature became available, I reorganized my local Subversion-versioned projects from a scattered mess of thirty or so disparate trunk and branch working copies into a single working copy per project, rooted at the project’s root directory and sparsely populated from there. Now, …

Subversion 1.7 Q & A, part 4

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
December 2, 2011

So… have you installed Subversion 1.7 yet? Are you enjoying the performance increases it brings? Is WC-NG your new best friend, or are you hanging posters around your home town which read: “MISSING: .svn folders. Last seen hanging around Subversion 1.6. REWARD OFFERED!!”? Subversion 1.7 has been available for seven weeks now, and has already seen one subsequent patch release, with a second one (1.7.2) expected to be released today or tomorrow. Many of you have embraced this new version of Subversion; others have not. If you haven’t, and you aren’t quite sure what I’m talking about or don’t see …

Subversion 1.7 Q & A, part 3

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
October 21, 2011

This is the third of, I predict, four posts containing answers to questions asked of my colleague Bob Jenkins and I during our recent Subversion 1.7 webinar. (For the previous posts, see part 1 and part 2 of this series.) Today’s batch of questions begin to deviate a bit from the primary topic of Subversion 1.7, but that’s okay — maybe one or more of these questions were on your mind, too. Q: How does Subversion 1.7 compare with Git and Mercurial? I think a full comparison of Subversion with Git or Mercurial might be a bit more of an …

Subversion 1.7 Q & A, part 2

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
September 30, 2011

As promised, I’m continuing to answer questions posed during my recent Subversion 1.7 webinar. Today’s batch of questions were mostly queries about the release itself — whether it brings some particular feature or fixes some particular problem. Admittedly, much of what folks were asking about is not part of this current Subversion release, which can make for a somewhat disappointing read. But I would urge readers to keep the context in mind: these questions were asked immediately after I spend a half hour or so talking about all the things that Subversion 1.7 does deliver. So without further ado, here …

Subversion 1.7 Q & A, part 1

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
September 28, 2011

Last week, my colleague Bob Jenkins and I presented a webinar introducing folks to the forthcoming Subversion 1.7.0 release. As always, there were right many questions asked of us during the designated Q & A period and not enough allotted time to answer them all. So, we promised to answer the unanswered questions here on this blog. This is the first batch of those questions and our answers. We’ve grouped questions into general categories, merged similar or related questions, and slightly rephrased some questions based on our interpretation of them. If you don’t see your question here, keep watching this …

Subversion 1.7 Webinar Follow-up

Subversion
Posted by C. Michael Pilato
September 21, 2011

Yesterday (September 20) I co-presented the webinar “Subversion 1.7 – Why You Should Care” with my esteemed CollabNet colleague Bob Jenkins. For about an hour we shared with our audience a sneak peek into the forthcoming major release of Apache™ Subversion®. If you were in attendance, please accept my gratitude for choosing to spend your time with us. I sincerely hope that Bob and I were able to successfully convey to you the highlights of the release and that you’ll make Subversion 1.7 a prioritized upgrade in — or new addition to — your own software stack. Bob and I …