The insane stress of not using svn.

[x4000]

It's funny, but in my tech demo project that I'm using, it's a pretty large thing -- 7 GB of assets, and 19.1 GB on disk once you factor in all of the shadow files and metadata files and so forth -- and I don't want to check that in to our normal svn repository host where I'd then have to pay for that storage forever.  It's not super expensive, but I see no reason to do that.

But I've been getting extremely stressed out at the inability to do things like make changes willy-nilly and revert if something is messed up, and to generally keep track of diffs to code that I make, etc.

So I finally downloaded VisualSVN Server and have set that up on my local machine just to have that in place locally.  I don't need to share this repo with anyone since it won't be kept long-term and I'll be the only one in this one, and so that's a really nice workaround.

If you're a coder and you work without source control, I don't understand how you do it.

[Cinth]

Have 7 working copies scattered across your desktop for various edits and branches

[Tridus]

Oh god, I wouldn't have made it that long without getting some kind of source control. Not having that fallback option would drive me batty.

[kasnavada]

Git.

Local repo + repo on a server next to you...

With Git you can keep your local commits forever and only save on the main server when really needed.

[x4000]

It's only been a few days, and I was going nuts.

In terms of Git, I absolutely loathe it.  It's slow, it's overly complicated, we used it for a while and it was a joy to stop.   Been using svn for over a decade now, and while it's not the best thing ever it is the best of what I've seen.

[kasnavada]

Ah ? I don't especially like git more than that, but it sounded much like something you could need for a local repo, as it's built-in. Then again I don't especially like svn either. Some of git's tools are very, very good, like rebase and the cherry pick feature. Patching too. Where I currently work the clients keep changing what they want and that saved our a**es multiple times. SVN is much simpler to use, however, which is a big point.

Also, I'm speaking about git's current (possibly it was worse when you tried it) - and the few last years were spent on CVS... so... yeah. Possibly coming back from that makes me a bit biased. SVN evolved a bit too, I think. Didn't keep much track of that.

Best I worked with was synergy continuus though, but... AFAIK that's not deployable on a small structure at all. I think it changed names since I had to use it.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

What I do is download a base copy of whatever I'm coding, then make local copies of it. That way, I never touch the base copy, and I always have a reference point.

[x4000]

Making copies of the code is a really inefficient way to handle it, because then you don't have diffs set up in a centralized fashion.  Once you commit to source control and get the hang of it, there's nothing like it.

As far as Git goes, we were using GitHub for Release Raptor about 4ish months ago.  We used the TortoiseGit client on top of it, then later switched to using our preferred TortoiseSVN as a frontend, and it was just slow and clunky the whole time.  Part of that is probably GitHub itself, but still.  I also tried out a service that Microsoft provides Git through, and that was similarly slow, so my impression is that it's Git itself.

[Cinth]

Making copies of the code is a really inefficient way to handle it

Yes, yes it is.  But when you don't know what you're doing, you do what comes to mind first.

[x4000]

Making copies of the code is a really inefficient way to handle it

Yes, yes it is.  But when you don't know what you're doing, you do what comes to mind first.

That is what I used to do as well, back when I was first designing the code that eventually turned into Shattered Haven which eventually turned into AI War 1.0.  That was circa 2002 in DirectDraw7, making Mario clones.  It was the year after that that I was introduced to Visual Sourcesafe, which is a travesty of source control from Microsoft.  Used that for a couple of years, maybe two at most, then a former coworker introduced me to svn.

[Cinth]

For me it was messing around in the guts of Starward Rogue.   

[NickAragua]

Yep, for any project of more than trivial complexity, source control is a requirement. Even if it's just you working by yourself.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

Yes, yes it is.  But when you don't know what you're doing, you do what comes to mind first.

This. It also works well with smaller projects or projects where you want to force yourself to document everything and don't have source control. But, given the option, I'd always take source control of some sort.

[Cyborg]

I think the problem with git is that everyone is always merging instead of rebasing. It really requires a technical knowledge of what's going on under the hood.

One thing I don't like about version control is how it feels like you are locked into it, and every version control software feels like rebasing is more complicated than it should be. Once you run into your first troubleshooting session with a version control that is experiencing some complex problem, and you have to play tech support with your code base, you learn pretty quick that you need to be doing backups in addition to regular version control.

For this reason, I create points of time with the code saved as a directory somewhere when I'm at a key point in addition to using version control.

[Mad Rubicant]

What are the actual use cases for rebasing? I've never had to use it, and I used git for a hackathon project with 3 of my friends. The hardest part was merge conflicts, but a good IDE takes care of those for you.