test RPM for tf4mono

I just caught up on my reading of the mono mailing list and saw Miguel's post about Mono Packaged .NET apps for Mono.

Since I have debian packages and a win32 installer for tf4mono, I thought it might be time to make an RPM package as well and maybe help this QA effort.

Anyway, I downloaded the very helpful Mono 1.2.5 VMWare image and went to work on creating a spec file for rpmbuild. Side note: cleaning out the bash history and ~/.ssh might be a sensible improvement to this image.

I had to try and remember all the old rpm command line options I used to use in my sleep - as I fell in love with debian's apt-get several years ago and forgot most rpm incantations.

Anyway, here's the resultant RPM package. By the way, I enabled the optional gtksourceview-sharp based syntax highlighting in the package.

If anyone can review the tfs.spec.in file or the RPM file and offer suggestions for improvement, please do so. I'll gladly make a necessary cleanups.

I installed the package and ran "tf show build" and "tf show stats /server:my.tfs.server.ip" and "tf explore /server:my.tfs.server.ip" and everything seemed in order. The "tf show" commands are new in the soon to be released 0.5.2 version of tf4mono.

Monthly Sleep Deprivation

Oddly enough, I've seem to have fallen into a schedule of releasing updates
to tf4mono about once a month. This month's release is
tf4mono 0.5.1 which includes win32 installation packages, a GTK-based gui mode
for exploring TFS repositories, many command enhancements, improved builtin help with
usage guidelines, and numerous bugfixes.

I always need a bit of downtime after a release first of course -
working on open source software as a hobby is fun,
but always ends up meaning lost sleep every so often.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing what features would make tf4mono
more useful to you. Better support for locking files? Handling merge conflicts?
Easier building on win32 platforms? More GUI support? Let me know!

The master/trunk branch of tf4mono just got a "stats" command which makes use of
/VersionControl/v1.0/administration.asmx to generate some server statistics.

Here's some sample output:

(~/Source/tfs-lsg-1.0) tf stats
Files:           812421
Folders:         20033
Groups:          481
Pending Changes: 7907
Shelvesets:      180
Users:           184                                                                         
Workspaces:      154

I plan on augmenting this output a bit, but its a good start.

The most nagging issue for me is actually a NTLM bug in mono that I keep hoping someone will eventually fix. It could be bug
#80687, though I'm not sure of it. On windows boxen, tf4mono never gives occasional auth failures, but on mono it does - especially on a fast network.

By accident, I noticed that I never saw any auth failures when working from home
over a VPN, but at work I'd see the auth failures quite regularly. If I route my
TFS traffic at work thru my home machine, thru the VPN, and back to work I never see auth failures. So it seems the faster the network the more likely you are to see this NTLM bug in mono.