Version control and you

This line made me, a version control evangelist, very sad:

It is not good for nothing just because you can't use it to checkout source code. Version control is a Good Idea for any kind of software development. (Or writing, or web development, or really anything else that diff can cope with). I insist that everyone uses it for an extra dimension of organization.

I've taken a liking to Bazaar, which is a distributed version system. Git and Mercurial are other similar options. The benefit with a distributed system is it's Really Good at doing stuff locally (since the checkout on your local machine is as much a branch as anything else). I can simply navigate to a project directory, enter "bzr init; bzr add .", and then I have full version tracking ready to go. Every time I make a major change I enter "bzr commit", and if I want I can tag the revision for extra organization.
This way I have every single version of my source code available for free. I can handily revert files, look at changes between versions and keep track of old ideas without polluting my workspace.

(I use a nice GUI called Olive for a lot of this normally, which I think is available for Windows).

Naturally, it all scales, so if you ever decide to collaborate with someone it's easy to tell who did what and to keep versions synchronized.

Really smart idea. Think of it like a shadow backup system for source code :)
(And then do it!)

I prefer git, myself. Just seems like the nicest option, what with GitHub offering a great way for open-source folks to share their work, the distributed nature, and being able to use it with Subversion (required due to TextMate's bundle repo being under Subversion).

I don't know how it stacks up with Mercurial or Bazaar too well. My time with both was fairly short, since I was already well interested in git by the time I had gotten around to looking at them. I lost interest when I found out they both relied on Python, which I find to be unacceptable given Python's start-up time alone is insane.

I agree that version control is important but personally I avoid using outdated stuff like SVN. I prefer Perforce which comes with nice tools (merge, diff, etc.) and a nice graphical user interface. It's free for up to 2 clients or if you use it for an open source project.

Most of my code has always been fairly simple - all I do is "Save AS" everytime I've got a stable update working with an incremental number suffixed on the end of the filename.

I thought the more pressing concern of that topic would have been the security risks Mark spoke of. What are they and do they exist in the other forms of version control software mentioned here?

What's up the with the embolding for random letters, Noel?

[EDIT] Hehe, i see now :o)

UUUU           UUUU         SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS       EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
UUUU           UUUU       SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS       EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
UUUU           UUUU      SSSSS                      EEEE
UUUU           UUUU      SSSSS                      EEEE
UUUU           UUUU       SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS           EEEEEEEEEEE
UUUU           UUUU         SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS        EEEEEEEEEEE
UUUU           UUUU                      SSSS       EEEE
 UUUU         UUUU                       SSSS       EEEE
 UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU       SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS        EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
    UUUUUUUUUUU          SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS          EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE


GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG      IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII       TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG      IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII       TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
GGGG           GGGG              IIII                       TTTT        
GGGG                             IIII                       TTTT        
GGGG                             IIII                       TTTT        
GGGG        GGGGGGG              IIII                       TTTT        
GGGG           GGGG              IIII                       TTTT        
GGGG           GGGG              IIII                       TTTT        
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG      IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII               TTTT        
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG      IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII               TTTT        

:D

I made it myself.

As the author of that quote at the top I suppose I should reply. My issue wasn't with SVN as a concept, but rather that firstly the stable download of MaxGUI wasn't stable, and then to get a stable version I had to start jumping through lots of hoops. I don't use SVN for anything else so I had to install it all and now I'm going to have to uninstall it all as I still don't use it for anything else.

So that's why it's broken then.

Hmm, I'm having a strange compulsion to use something called git.

SVN is used to download bruceys mods as well so its quite useful

I really wish the BlitzMax IDE had a "Check for updates" option like almost everything else has now-a-days

Do we actually **need** any kind of separate system to check for changes? Afterall, isn't it just a case of checking for time/date stamp differences then downloading the new stuff?

o.O use git, use git o.O

Hmm, I'm still using Tortoise Subversion at home - anyone else used other versioning systems mentioned above and had experience of Tortoise SVN ?

From what I've read about Git it does look a lot more interesting than Subversion. But so far Windows clients for Git are scarce and TortoiseSVN is superb in working with. So I'll stick with Subversion for some time.

I use a true SVN server and Tortoise SVN on my clients.

I use Tortoise on my vista machine... but for mac I use the already installed command line utils.

I have all that with SVN.

I hope he can get it back up and working... I have made modifications to a few of the brl mods so the merge utils really came in handy.

Good to see Tortoise is still heralded, the Diff tool within it is something I spent a while looking for on Windows, you kind of take them for granted on UNIX.

Yes.

No.