On Tue, Mar 01, 2016 at 08:53:35AM -0500, Pat Schloss wrote: > … one of the strengths that I feel formal version control wins with > vs. dropbox is that I can rm -rf my_project and do a pull from > github and get my project back.
I think the main strength of distributed version control over anything centralized (SVN, Dropbox, …) is that it's distributed. Then when GitHub is down, like it was for two hours recently [1], you can keep working away at your laptop without having to care. If you need to sync up with a colleague in the meantime, you can mail them a bundle [2]. This also works if you're in Kenya without a reliable connection to the wider internet [3]. It looks like Dropbox has something like this, but it still requires a connection to the wider internet (although I'm not sure why you'd need an internet connection to know when to sync) [4]. But if thirty days of backups [5] (or copy/rename backups like my-script.sh-2016-03-01), being tied to the global network [4], being tied to a particular company, and installing proprietary binaries on your hardware are acceptable to you, then go ahead and use Dropbox. No tool is going to be perfect for everybody, and retooling is hard. I think SWC should focus on demonstrating the tools that work for us, so learners don't have “why didn't someone tell be about $x earlier?” moments. If we tell them about a workflow or tool we like, and they go on and do something else anyway, that's their prerogative. Cheers, Trevor [1]: https://github.com/blog/2106-january-28th-incident-report [2]: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-bundle [3]: http://www.datacarpentry.org/blog/tdwg/ [4]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/137 [5]: https://www.dropbox.com/help/122 -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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