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We are a team of two people who need a versioning system for their university project. Due to administration issues, the graders need us to register on a site that happens to only support SVN; however, we cannot commit to SVN from inside the university as the required protocols are filtered out by the proxy (including the HTML extensions that would make SVN checkins over HTTP possible). Sigh.

Is it possible to have a hg repo for ourselves that can then be converted to SVN for purposes of hosting on this site?

Please note that practically all students commute to university, so the "we can't commit from university so we can't do this" is not as strong of an argument as you'd think.

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    Get one of the other parties to fix their policy - either allow the traffic or allow a different version control system. That's just silly. Or have THEM come up with a solution. Why is it on you guys?
    – Tim
    Nov 10, 2010 at 17:08
  • I didn't try it but found this mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/WorkingWithSubversion
    – hiena
    Nov 10, 2010 at 17:18
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    Tunnel your svn over ssh? Problem solved? They cannot be blocking ssh, maybe they can.
    – Chris
    Nov 10, 2010 at 17:59
  • @chris, I'd do that if I had a suitable endpoint :)
    – badp
    Nov 10, 2010 at 18:26
  • Seems to me this is the easiest approach without pulling too many teeth.
    – Chris
    Nov 10, 2010 at 18:36

3 Answers 3

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As someone who's been on the grader/ta end of the world, the appropriate action is to raise a stink with the professor and the grades. He needs to know. Also raise a stink with the IT department. Stink all around. This is unreasonable, and something needs to give, and it's not you - in this case.

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If the university is both requiring (via the graders) and forbidding (via IT) you to do something, then it's THEIR problem. First off, start with the graders making this request, inform them that you CAN NOT COMPLY and see what they can do. Also inform the professor (who presumably gives orders to the graders) and (if necessary) the department head. Somewhere along the line, they have to either give you a different target, or they have to let you do what they've assigned. There is no other option.

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Well, if you only need to submit to the graders once then why do you need to use SVN at all until the final submission? Just use a different repo and be done with it, then push to SVN when you are ready. For day to day stuff use whatever you want.

If the inconsistent policies are not going to get fixed then I wouldn't worry too much about using the SVN repo they want or just commit off campus.

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