[Noisebridge-discuss] [dorkbotsf-blabber] Embedded code - version control experience?

Josh Juran jjuran at gmail.com
Mon Feb 20 05:30:17 UTC 2012


On Feb 19, 2012, at 2:21 PM, Larry Edelstein wrote:

> I've worked in software for a long time now, and feel qualified to  
> speak on VCS. It's changed, and you valiant garage-dwelling  
> embedded guys and dolls (please allow me my romantic image of  
> y'all) shouldn't miss out on what's new.
>
> The "distributed", peer-to-peer version control systems like Git,  
> Mercurial, and Bazaar are much better than dinosaurs like CVS, SVN,  
> SourceSafe, etc. for just about any project.

CVS is a long-obsolete, inadequate, and overly flawed tool, but it  
doesn't deserve the dishonor of being mentioned in the same sentence  
as SourceSafe.

>  But if you make the investment to get used to distributed VCS, you  
> will never go back.

Agreed.  I went from CVS straight to Git, and now I find SVN  
unbearable.  If I need to work on a project in SVN, I download a  
source tarball and check it into a local Git repo, hack on it, and  
send patches to the mailing list.

> When you use one of these new-wave VCS, you store your code in a  
> repository a server, like you're used to, but you and anyone else  
> who works with that code replicates most or all of that repository  
> on their development machine. (Now that we all have plenty of hard- 
> drive space and low-latency high-bandwidth networks (er, except  
> Carl), replication is cheap.)

Especially if the project has SVN "branches" or "tags" for each  
release.  Try checking out the nginx SVN repo, for example.  You get  
3 *gigs* of data; the actual checkout is only about 5 megs.  And the  
checkout takes forever.  Git keeps your entire history in each client  
repo as well, but does so in a way that's efficient both to transfer  
and to store on disk.  (For one thing, it doesn't keep multiple  
copies of the same blob of data.)

Josh





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