Subversion Revisited Again. Kind Of…
It took me about two days to write a post on How To Setup Subversion (SVN) With A Virtual Appliance.
So I’m not going to try and convince you to use Source Control. Instead I’m going to show you how easy it is to set one up, you have no excuses not to use it.
But guess who came along and wrote his own post on Subversion. (Setting up Subversion on Windows) Its pretty weird that we were both thinking about version control. Jeff talks about setting up SVN in the Windows OS using the default installer from Subversion. Its is good idea to learn how to setup Subversion once, and its worth a read if you have never done it. After that I would still recommend running SVN in a VM. Its easier to move around and back up since its all running in a file. His post does has some good points though.
I’ve met precious few developers that really understood the versioning concepts in the simple centralized source control model. I have only the vaguest of hopes that these developers will be able to wrap their brains around the vastly more complicated and powerful model of distributed source control.
Also the big blogs are battling it out about issue of using SVN or distributed source control. Even Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) has chimed in about how much he hates SVN and runs GIT.
Czajnik responding to Jeff Atwood’s howto on setting up Subversion on windows: “Have you tried any distributed source control? I’ve recently switched from Subversion to Mercurial, and I’m very happy about the change. The most important reason was the ability to clone the repository to my laptop, do some checkins there (without network access, on a plain, train, etc.) and resync with just one command when I’m back home. Distributed model seems cool even for a single developer :)”
Jeff does respond back in his comments and also talk about GIT from Linus’ talk.
I watched the rest of Linus’ talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 . Git *enforces* per-developer personality-driven p2p branches. This is great for ego-driven people like Linus who have a lot of power, fame, and personality. That makes sense.
I’m really intrigued by Linus’ claim that merging becomes extraordinarily simple in Git. He’s absolutely right about that– the problem with branches isn’t the branching, it’s the merging.
Wow… It feels cool that I’m thinking about the same stuff that these guys are thinking of… just maybe not on the same level =) However, I want my readers to get some main ideas from my post on version control.
- Version Control is good and you should use it
- VA’s are great for version control deployment. Easy to setup, runs on different OS’s. Network accessible. Easy to back up.
Yes, you should learn Subversion or another Version Control package. And if you want a custom VA, creating your own with an Ubuntu Image is very easy and clonable. I have create my own VA with Ubuntu and Tomcat running Axis. It has a shared SMB drive and from Windows I drop my WAR package and deploy web services. If anyone is interested in a copy of my Web Service VA let me know. (*HINT* post a comment, I can see your e-mail address but not the rest of the world) Hmm… maybe my next blog will be about how I created it.
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