Discuss: I Wonder What This Button Does

by Mike West

31 typo :-|

Hey there, just wanted to add that there is a small typo in the article. The software is called “tortoise”, not “tortise” ;) Excellent article btw, as always!

posted at 02:16 pm on July 28, 2006 by Lukas Grumet

For GUI clients, I have been using SvnX, which is ok. It does what I need it to do, but as Danny mentions is still not very good for someone who doesn’t like the command line. The designer I work with doesn’t know where to start.

Has anyone tried the plugin for Quicksilver? I just activated it, but it seems quite promising.

posted at 01:25 am on July 29, 2006 by Keith Bingman

33 I got confuzzled

I tried SVN (+ TortoiseSVN) twice, and it just didn’t do it for me. It’s not that it didn’t have enough features, it’s almost like it had too many features.

I expected something easier. I want something that sits in the background and perhaps records the state of my sauce code at given intervals (seconds, minutes, hours, maybe even keystrokes, I don’t know), and all this gets stored in a nice database that keeps track of the changes for me and allows me to restore them. Ideally this would be automated and I wouldn’t have to give an order to save my work. As a single developer this is all I need; to go back in time.

SVN proved to be too much for me. I found that I could just as easily copy/paste my source code files to a directory every once in a while and save it. Maybe if I ever work with somebody this will change.

posted at 02:36 am on July 29, 2006 by Richard Mason

34 If you do delete your files

If you happen to be on BSD or linux and have in fact deleted a file very recently, there might still be a chance to get it back. I faced this once before, and wrote up my experience here:
http://bluesmoon.blogspot.com/2004/08/undelete-in-freebsd.html

Hope it helps others.

posted at 12:12 pm on July 29, 2006 by Philip Tellis

35 I Just Like SVN !!

I Just Like SVN… Iam using SVN in eclipse with sublipse plugin and it’s so simple just a click away…

posted at 02:06 pm on July 29, 2006 by Balakumar Muthu

36 Untitled

I use SVN on Dreamhost account to keep files away in case of hdd crash or something and to be able to connect and work in many locations. I’m the only editor of those files, but it’s great to move back in time to restore a piece of code I was sure won’t be necessary any more. The Subclipse plugin for Eclipse makes it very easy.
At work we use CVS for teamwork synchronization and it does good job as well. It makes life easier, but doesn’t solve the human factor. Everyone in the team has to commit every change as soon as it’s done, not “when I’ll finish the changes I’m going to do tomorrow”

posted at 11:08 pm on August 3, 2006 by Pawel Knapik

37 Good version control is nothing without the infras

No matter what form of version control one uses, you are only halfway there unless you have a decent hierarchical storage/backup system. I spent a goodly portion of my IT career in storage mangement, and in some cases had to recover DB instances for our version control software to a previous date (ok, we recovered it to a shadow system, extracted what was needed, and updated the online VCS, with the data needed) Of course you may not have the luxury of a large disk farm with HSM software and a robotic tape library, but reasonable solutions can be implemented at even the single server level. Disk and tape are cheap, when compared to the man-hour cost of lost time. That’s my take on it (yes, I’m an operations/hardware kind of guy, well..was, retired this year after 33 years in IT) Cheers
Harold

posted at 08:32 pm on August 7, 2006 by Harold Clitheroe

38 Right on time!

Two months ago, I would just skip this article, labeling it “too techie”. But then, some of my co-workers started talking about Subversion, and last week we started using it. And yes, it’s great! Whenever those programming bastards mess up my CSS, I can point right to the guilty one and give him a good ol’ spanking!

posted at 07:29 pm on August 10, 2006 by Hilde Skjølberg

39 Subversion for travelers: SVK

If you spend a lot of time on a laptop without Internet access—even if you just take the train to work every morning—“svk”:http://svk.elixus.org/ can be very handy. It’s a program that interfaces with a Subversion repository, but it mirrors all the history on your own disk, allowing you to check changes into your local repository even when you don’t have Internet access (like when you’re traveling). You can later synchronize with the central copy of the repository. Since you have all the history with you, you can do all the neat back-in-time stuff you’d normally need access to the server to do. And it lets you keep long projects in local branches that nobody else can screw up. Very useful all around.

posted at 02:30 am on August 15, 2006 by Brent Royal-Gordon