OR2012 Developer Challenge:
Repositories Based on Version Control Systems

I often despair when looking at the backend code of most repositories. Versioning is a central concept in most preservation services. The IT world have made great leaps in source code versioning systems since the nineties, but the repositories (well, Fedora) have not made use of these improvements. It is an illusion to think that we can, with our limited budgets, build better versioning systems than SVN and GIT.

My idea, which I hope will be a prototype for the presentation, will be a repository with a Fedora like interface, based on an SVN server. This will have the advantage that you will be able to checkout and commit a number of objects as one transaction, something that is not currently possible in Fedora. For mass processing, you could checkout the entire repository, and put it in the mass processing working storage. This way, your mass processing jobs could access and modify this content, without having to go through your repository. You would then be able to ingest the entire mass processing result as one step.