Martin Lüthi wrote:
Hi again
At Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:49:46 -0700, Aaron Birenboim wrote:
For the purpose of tracking files and exchanging them with collegues, only decentralized VC makes sense (maybe with a central repository, but that is not important). CVS is dead, SVN is not very good for that purpose. Huh? That is the primary purpose of SVN, AFAIK.
SVN is great for centralized data repositories. I used to use it for several years for all my data, basically synchronizing laptop and desktop, and collaboration on projects. The major drawback (for me) is that you need a connection to the server with the central repository to commit changes.
This can be a good thing. Easier for one person to set up a server than many to establish peers.
After having switched to git (any distributed VC such as hg or bzr will do), I commit every non-trivial editing/work step locally, and push to my repository (visible to my collaborators, and with daily backups) when I have reached a point where I think it's worth that the collaborators get it (usually daily).
Yes. a drawback of SVN is the branching. I'm sure it is easier in GIT, but learning how to use it is tricky. The Suggested SVN method is to work in a branch, commit frequently, then merge back to trunk when you are ready to share. Agreed, this is a pain. Inferior to CVS. I'm glad to hear that GIT addresses this.
Work on new features is done in local branches (very cheap with git), collaborators usually pull my master branch, and I pull theirs.
Since there is no central repository, data exchange is less formal and easier. And (the killer argument for me): I have versioning on my local machine, without network connection (of course you can use CVS/RCS, but that does not make sense anymore given the new decentralized VC systems).
Yea. I often use RCS for local versioning. Then again, I usually have a network, and update repositories often (in branches).
I do agree that CVS is dead. It was adequate, but it is no longer being supported.
SVN is still the most active Revision Control system out there. I think you can set up an account on sourceforge.net for free. I think their favorite system is SVN.
Submitting cave survey data to sourceforge.net is dangerous. Sourceforge is world-visible, and I shure don't want the local caving-hero (advertising his caving adventures on the net, without any awe or scientific interest) to know all the details about new discoveries which are visible in plans.
I wasn't aware survey data was part of this repository. Perhaps I missed part of the conversation. I was thinking about the application source.
They might provide Trac too, which is a nice ticket/bug tracker which integrates with SVN.
Trac is nice, but I'm not shure how much we would need it for cave survey data (this is what we talk about, isn't it?).
Yea. for survey data, somebody would need to provide SVN over SSH.
Using git, for example, you can publish your repository on any web server space (also password protected), or any shared area on your computer, and just send the URL to your peers. From there they pull your changes, and you can pull theirs from either their repositories, or form a centralized space such as github.com (same cautions as about sourceforge.net apply).
Fair enough. With those requirements, perhaps getting people to learn GIT is worth the effort. aaron