Awtch

Lessons learned: no unicode in filenames on my blog.

I had the great idea, a few days ago, to write a short blog post about my trip to Cologne, and to give the file a name with a UTF-8 character in it (the ö, to be exact). Except that I forgot how my blog actually works...

I use blosxom to manage my RSS feed and other parts of the blog; but to integrate it properly in my website, I wrote a whole lot of stuff around that. It's not just blosxom:

  • All files are in a subversion repository.
  • On the server, there is a file:/// checkout of the subversion repository in /var/local/blosxom. Files in this checkout are owned by the www-data user.
  • The subversion repository has a rather long post-commit hook:
    • wouter@samba:/var/lib/svn/blog/hooks$ grep -v '^#' post-commit | wc -l
20

    It takes care of updating the repository in /var/local/blosxom, and then fixes the timestamps on those files based on the timestamp of the original commit in the subversion repository. It's an ugly amalgam of svnlook date, svnlook history, touch and things, but it works. Sortof. Except if I remove a file, or if the svnlook history thing doesn't find the file itself. Finally, it will call blosxom itself, in the mode in which it creates files on disk rather than trying to do CGI output.

  • In blosxom, then, I added two extra flavours: one I call myrss, and another I call php. The myrss flavour is used because I don't like blosxom's default RSS output; it doesn't do anything strange. The php flavour is what you see when you go to my blog on my website: it helps me integrate the blog in the rest of the "design" (ahem) of my website, allows me to add google ads in between my blog posts, and, finally, to hook in my home-brewn comment system (which uses postgres to store comments).

Apparently, however, subversion thinks differently about UTF-8 filenames if you do a checkout from a repository when using a http:// or a file:// URL. As a result, there were some issues in the post-commit subversion hook that I wrote, resulting in the svn up part of the post-commit not entirely succeeding. Or some such. Then, the touch is done, and the svn up doesn't work at all, anymore. In short, things started to break horribly, resulting in empty posts (because the files were created by touch rather than svn up), the comment thing being confused about filenames (and, as a result, postgres complaining about incorrect UTF-8 encodings), and similar other ugliness.

So, I just renamed the file, and did a cleanup of the subversion checkout in /var/local/blosxom. I'll just have to cope with the fact that my setup doesn't like unicode, I guess. Or, perhaps, finally switch to ikiwiki some day, which I've been thinking about ever since Joey first blogged about it a few years ago. But that's not urgent...