[Therion] Version Control Systems and Therion

[Martin Lüthi]

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.

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).

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).

> 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.

> 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?).

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).

Summary:
o version control is good (mandatory)
o decentralized version control is much better
o backups (long term) are a must

git (or hg, bzr) provide all of this

Best, Martin