Re: [tlug] Command Line is Good to Learn . . .

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Joe" == Joe Larabell <fred62@???> writes:

    Joe> I used 'cvs' to put a repository in a directory on the USB
    Joe> memory. I then imported the latest version of my project
    Joe> files and did clean checkouts on both my work and home
    Joe> machines.

This makes sense if you already know how to work with CVS.  However,
all of the "modern" SCMs (git, darcs, arch/bazaar, mercurial, prcs,
...) will do this just as well (except that I don't know how they'll
handle lack of POSIX permissions).

    Joe> 1) If you forget to copy the files some day, you can still
    Joe> continue work on the other machine, in an unrelated part of
    Joe> the code, and have a good chance that you won't have a messy
    Joe> manual merging job to do later. In the case of a simple
    Joe> copy/rsync to the iPod, that would be harder to pull off.

CVS is OK by this standard, but any of the others will do much better.

    Joe> 2) You get all the history-related benefits of cvs for free.

"Benefits"?  You're generous! :-)  For this application CVS is probably
OK, though.  (For those have haven't paid attention to the SCM wars,
CVS does not have a notion of "atomic" commits across files.  In an
active repository it's often very difficult to identify which commits
to various different files belong together.)

    Joe> I don't know how this would play out with other version
    Joe> control systems.  The repository for CVS is fairly light (not
    Joe> much more than 2x the total size of all the files, even with
    Joe> quite a few rounds of edit history)

Git is quite a bit lighter (it compresses the objects).  Arch can be
heavy.  Darcs is somewhere in between.

    Joe> One drawback... if you are already using version control on
    Joe> the project in question, this solution could get messsy. You
    Joe> would have to figure out how to have the same working copy of
    Joe> the files owned by two repositories

I can say from experience that both git and darcs handle this
situation well, git even better than darcs.  They don't even much care
what the other SCM is.

-- 
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