[Cialug] Version Control

[Nathan Stien]

On 6/7/07, David Bierce <operations at cynicbytrade.com> wrote:
> Last night I watched Linus give his google talk on version control.
> Has anyone played around with GIT?  Or used GIT with Subversion?
>
> I'm Ugly and Stupid and use subversion, but distributed versioning
> sounds like it has quite a few benefits for distributed projects.

It has quite a few benefits for non-distributed projects, too.

I personally like bzr [1], which I find a lot easier to use than git.
It is written in python, so it's an order of magnitude slower than
git, but I really don't spend any time waiting on it.  Really nice if
you're already used to svn.  The migration path from svn is pretty
painless.

[1]: http://bazaar-vcs.org/

I have previously gushed [2] about it on the list.

[2]: http://www.cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/2007-April/007582.html

I track pretty much everything with it, particularly /etc/ stuff.  I
even have a cronjob that periodically does a 'bzr commit' in my
.mozilla/firefox/whatever/ directory so that my prefs.js and
session.js are continuously saved (if they haven't changed, then the
commit does nothing).  I for some reason like to have 100 tabs open at
a time some days (inveterate middle-clicker), and I hate to have
something destroy my session.

I also track my local mods to other people's projects with it.  E.g.,
I have my own patches against rockbox [3], so whenever i do a 'svn
update', I then let bzr handle the merging.  I also use it to have
finer-grained local commits of a client's code, so I'm not putting
something useful but possibly broken into their precious perforce
repository.

[3]: http://rockbox.org/


-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581