Hi friends.

I inform you about the next site's changes. You know that the site has been hacked some times ago and I applied a very temporary patch to ensure some security, but obviously it's not enough: what I would have to do is the manual editing of a lot of files of the board to upgrade them. The problem is that actually we have no more the original files because they have been modified by me in order to add features/modify the look. So I tried to start the work but it's a real, real mess   and I lost myself.

So I'm waiting for two major upgrades of the software that we're using here (phpBB): the phpBB 3.0 "Olympus" and the related "Minerva" forum, that is the version that we're using here ("Minerva" is a modified "phpBB" and I modified Minerva too... a mess). I don't know when they will be released, I hope during this year...lol... So I thought that it's useless to do the editing work now, I'll wait for the new software before making upgrades.

Nothing will change however, the user's interface should be nearly the same, I've only to apply our graphics. In the meantime the site is at risk of hackers attack because I don't know how long my security patch will work, in any cas I'm backing up often and if you see something strange please try to inform me asap...

____________

Have you considered using a source code management system to maintain the source code?  A system such as rcs or cvs?  For the future version, once established you can install original source code into the system
for version control.  check out the part you need to alter.  Check in the altered version, and rcs or cvs will store the changes as a series of deltas from the original.  You can then extract from the repository the most recent version or any prior version.  you can also use it to extract only you modification so that they could be applied to even more future offical version of the software, with appropriate additional modifications.  It does not eliminate all headaches of maintaining a customized version of the software, but it can help.

http://directory.fsf.org/rcs.html
http://directory.fsf.org/cvs.html

Pangor

Thank you pangor   ! I have a beta version installed at

http://www.posetteforever.com

and I think it has CVS   ...

____________

I don't think that we are talking about the same thing.

In the case of the beta site, it may be the CVS prereleased version of the software.  I was referring to your setting up a private CVS repository to maintain your modifications to the software, sepperate from any version that is being used.

For example:

You aquire the soure code of the orginal (unmodified by you) version of the software.  You submit it into your private CVS or RCS repository.  When you need to modify any of the code, you check out the files you need to modify.  After you are finished, you check the modified versions back into the system.  The system will compare the new version with the prior version and store only the changed parts of the files.

Latter when you need to access the files you can chack them out again.  If you need to merge you changes into a newly released version of the software, the control system can provide you with just the patches or it can try to merge you changes into the new version for you.  Leaving you to manually update only those parts of the software that has changed so much from the previous offical release that the control system can not apply the patches automatically.

P.S. I don't know how well or poorly the Windows ports of CVS and RCS work.  The old Dos port of RCS did not work as well as the native unix version, because of the 8.3 limitations of the Dos filesystem.  Other than some brief experience with the Dos port, I have used the native unix version only.

Pangor

Too much complicate for this bus driver... I'll give you the work to do next time   ...

____________

TORMENTOR";p="20633 wrote: 

Thank you pangor   ! I have a beta version installed at

http://www.posetteforever.com

and I think it has CVS   ...

Cool!        

____________
Here we go!