Bro's Subversion Repository

We are happy to announce public access to the Bro Subversion repository. As our usual release cycle for new Bro versions tends to be rather long, this will allow the Bro community to benefit more quickly from improvements made to the system. From now on, we will provide public read-only access to two important subparts of the repository (we cannot open all of the repository as it also contains some local data):

• The trunk. The trunk is the main development head from which the releases are made on a regular basis. The trunk tends to run pretty stable and all changes are required to pass a regression suite to ensure that they do not break existing functionality. Still, the trunk is considered experimental and not suitable for critical deployments. Here's how you get a copy of the current trunk: svn checkout http://svn.icir.org/bro/trunk/bro As usual, see the CHANGES for the news. There is also an RSS feed of the commits to the trunk at http://www.icir.org/svn-feeds/bro-trunk.rss
• Development branches. In our development model, most work is first done in separate branches until it is eventually considered sufficiently stable to be merged into the trunk. Typically, each Bro developer works own his own development branch (or even multiple of them). While we do not generally open up all branches, we will soon provide access to a subset of them (determined by the branch owners) so that interested people can try new stuff as quickly as possible. Note however that these branches are really unstable; things may break without warning. If something doesn't work as expected, feel free to contact the maintainer of the branch but don't necessarily expect an immediate fix ... Watch this blog for announcements of development branches.

We hope that access to the repository will provide Bro users with a better picture of the system's progress between releases. We will use this blog to introduce some of the features as they are added. At the same time, the public repository should make it easier to contribute patches back into the Bro development.