The local LUG group is small and shrinking, due to weak recruiting efforts and a failure to strike a balance between student oriented and staff oriented events. In fact, the website appears to be down today. I take some of the blame here, but we can also blame Canonical for making Ubuntu too easy and too popular -- the last installfest, the mainstay of LUG events, was basically unattended save for some Wii gaming courtesy of the ACM student chapter.

In fact, pretty much the only thing that gets students' attention these days is video games. So it's time to adapt. If students don't want or need installfests, we should find out what they do want and work with that. With that in mind, I decided I should prepare a survey for a games related event. Coworkers have used SurveyMonkey in the past, but have been upset about the bait and hook approach. In googling for SurveyMonkey alternatives, I came across Limesurvey (formerly PHPSurvey). It appears to be a nice OSS app that approaches the same features as SurveyMonkey.

Unfortunately, it's not yet packaged in Ubuntu, only Debian experimental. So the rest of this post shall be dedicated a technique I've adopted for coping with this. Particularly, the svn:externals property, which allows for nested checkouts.

svn:externals

A few months ago, I finally took the plunge and set up svnhome. Technically, git is all the rage these days, but SVN should import into git without loss of information at a later date, and it's professionally relevant right now for me to dig into advanced SVN features. This does involve a lot of svn:ignore properties, and at first I was really trigger happy with the ignore. Originally, I ignored my src/ directory, but since they're mostly SVN checkouts, I might as well use svn:externals, to document what I've got and where it came from.

What makes this a bit complicated is that I want to combine the LimeSurvey SVN checkout with the debian packaging that's also in an SVN collab-maint branch. That, and they're both external to my homedir structure. Originally I had chained the externals, marking LimeSurvey external in the homedir repo, and the debian/ directory external to the limesurvey checkout. The problem is I don't have commit rights to the LimeSurvey repo, so I can't commit an svn:external in one computer and use svn update to duplicate the setup elsewhere. Some might propose that I should just svn export LimeSurvey, and merge it into my homedir repo (or not at all). I don't like it because it makes it harder to send patches upstream and pull patches from them.

The solution I've settled on is to define the debian checkout from the src/ dir:

limesurvey https://limesurvey.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/limesurvey/source/limesurvey

limesurveydebian svn://svn.debian.org/svn/collab-maint/deb- maint/limesurvey/trunk/debian

From the limesurvey checkout point of view, this does leave debian/ as unversioned, so I'll have to think harder about it or live with the questionmark. Perhaps bzr has a clean way to integrate all this.

But for now, I move on to building and installing. One minor challenge is that apt doesn't have a package to grab build depends from, so I have to do that manually. And LimeSurvey pulls in a LOT of libraries, some of which are packaged already, some of which are not. At least a few are bundled in other apps like PHPMyAdmin, so that'll be something to look at for collaborative improvement. And I should probably design and run that survey to start rekindling the LUG!