This is an ode to Dirk Engling’s OpenTracker.

It’s a BitTorrent tracker.

It’s what powered The Pirate Bay in 2007–2009.

I’ve been using it to power the downloads on http://driverpacks.net since the end of November 2010. >6 years. It facilitated 9839566 downloads since December 1, 2010 until today. That’s almost 10 million downloads!

Stability

It’s one of the most stable pieces of software I ever encountered. I compiled it in 2010, it never once crashed. I’ve seen uptimes of hundreds of days.

What?

This article proposes a novel, simpler way of managing Drupal sites (where “managing” in this case is solely code updating & deployment).

It relies on only one command-line tool: mr (“a Multiple Repository management tool”, http://joeyh.name/code/mr/), plus a Drupal plug-in for that tool: mr-drupal, https://github.com/wimleers/mr-drupal.

Why?

If you run Drupal sites, you need some way to manage them; some way to keep them up-to-date. As of Drupal 7, there’s a built-in update manager, but it doesn’t use a VCS.

Most likely, you want use a VCS to manage your Drupal site. You may be downloading tarballs and checking their contents into your VCS, or maybe you’re using git submodules or even git-subtree. For all of these, there’s a whole lot of process, a lot of steps, a lot to learn, and a lot of tricky things you have to think about each time you want to update something. Too much that can go wrong.

Jacob Singh did a presentation at DrupalCon London about “How to have an open relationship … with software (and still make paper)”. I’m one of the people he interviewed for his presentation.

One of the questions he asked, was this one:

How do you use version control, spreadsheets, text files, napkins, etc to track your customizations to Drupal modules and core? Until the DOG project is done, what is the best worst practice here? On the Gardens team for instance, we used a PATCHES.txt file which listed the date, author, description and link for every patch to core or contrib. low tech, somewhat functional. How do you do this?

He liked my answer so much that he told me I should write a blog post about it — even if I’d just copy my answer verbatim. I’d been wanting to do that for years now. “Better late than never”, right? Although it’s actually too late now, because this system was actually designed to work when Drupal’s code still lived at http://cvs.drupal.org…