Warming Up to the Idea of Distributed Source Control
I've been thinking about Subversion today. It's been brought on by the fact that the main Subversion server for the Shop has been down due to some reason that they never explained. At the same time, my local CVS pserver has been working just fine. But it got me to thinking. svn is nice for the ability to do svn status and get diffs and such. That's really nice. But if that's something you want to have, why not take it another step and make it all on your box - there's a Distributed SCM system. Like Git.
So... is it time to get into something like Git? Not sure. I was talking to a friend a while back and he's going in that direction because there are a lot of advantages to this scheme. Face it - the one thing CVS, Subversion, ClearCase, PVCS, etc. all have in common is that they have a central repository. This is great for a company that wants to have a 'vault' for their code. Some place to lock down, back-up, secure and control.
But if you say that's not important because there will be enough copies of the repository around, you don't have to worry about losing the whole thing. You can get it from your buddy. OK, "bad" for corporate-types, but for guys writing code on Open Source projects, it's ideal. I've got it - you've got it, and I don't have to constantly be connected to "The Source" to work and have version control. I only need to be connected to "The Source" if I want it to have what I've been doing.
Think of the case where one developer fixes one file and some of the other members need to get this file. With CVS you all get it when you do anything SCM-related. Nice if you have a fast network connection to "The Source", but if you don't it's painful. And if you don't need the change, you get it anyway, most likely.
Git (as an example) would let a group develop different parts of the project without having to connect to one another until they decided that it was time to share code - then they'd do it. And only then, share what they wanted. You could choose to have Git hosted in a central location for synching - much like a traditional 'primary' repository, if you wanted. There's no one way to do it.
I'm getting interested in the idea of having a central Git repository for historical records and then using Git locally to do most of the work. It would mean larger disk space usage, but I'm guessing with decent laptop drives it's not that big a deal. And there's TimeMachine to back it up. Might be a good idea. Have to give it more thought.