Hmmm.... I'm in a loquacious sort of mood and this spiel got long so I'm adding a summary blurb, I recommend read the blurb and skip the rest.
Summary: Modest needs of a lone developer not doing branching etc. can be met with file system based methodology. Even so IMHO an SCM is still a productively booster once learned. The full spiel: It sounds to me that Scott's needs are modest. Keep snapshots though time, very limited parallel development, most work constrained to a single host, only one developer. Given these factors it is true that using the file system for very simple version control is quite doable. For someone who has *already* mastered a SCM the cognitive burden of tracking code using the tool is much lower than the burden of doing that same work by hand as Scott is doing. It is my experience that even a lone coder doing no branching and working on only one host *still* will benefit hugely from using a tool. This is especially true of fossil as the learning curve is relatively small relative due to the reduced degrees of freedom, (e.g. branches, timeline etc. will look the same in all clones) relative to similar tools. I've tried working without an SCM in a few cases and it is a royal pain. Add the desire to keep my laptop, two home development machines and my internet exposed server in sync, the fact that I do parallel development often to allow exploration, bug fixes to old versions etc. and the frequency that I resort to things like bisect, it would be a massive hit to give up fossil. Your personal mileage may of course vary. Regarding git, other than it's arcane interface (i) the you are paying in learning curve for the additional power that comes from the extra degrees of freedom it provides. A developer willing to invest the time to deeply understand git will likely garner some benefits from that additional power. For most of us mortals the costs outweigh the benefits and the simpler tool, fossil, is a huge productivity boost for small learning cost. The other benefit git offers is impressive performance. How git can report extras 2x faster than a Unix find command covering the same directory tree and 10x faster than fossil is nothing short of amazing. For your average project this is milliseconds vs tenths of a second and no one cares but if you are working on large development trees with lots of detritus it becomes tiresome and I've noticed developers avoiding doing a fossil extras. Aside: I'm curious, does fossil stop at directories with no controlled files in an extras scan? That alone would be a huge optimization and might explain how git is faster than find. Just my $0.02. (i) Is fossil that much less arcane? Last I checked mv, cp and rm don't work the same as Unix, an ongoing annoyance for my users, then there is the bizarre choice to treat symlinks as files by default - does any other SCM do that? This bit me *again* recently and I'm still grumpy about it On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Scott Doctor <[email protected]> wrote: > > Which is why I like my process. Redundancy is good. Not dependent on some > algorithm to piece things back together. Disks are so frikkin large now > that it is not an issue to have multiple copies of the same file. If one > set gets corrupted, just use the one behind it. Fully self contained > archived snapshots not needing any program to access it. > > ------------ > Scott Doctor > [email protected] > ------------------ > > On 10/31/2015 1:53 AM, Stephan Beal wrote: > >> On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 6:27 AM, Michal Suchanek <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Unless you delete .git your checkout is always in well >> defined state. >> >> >> No, it's not. i once literally had one of the libgit maintainers at my >> desk for a full hour trying to get my repo (of a project we were both >> working on for our employers) back in a pushable state after it got jumbled >> up by me copy/pasting commands suggested by StackOverflow (about the worst >> place to get git advice). If one of the developers takes that long to >> straighten it out, then something is (IMO) fundamentally wrong. >> >> -- >> ----- stephan beal >> http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/ >> http://gplus.to/sgbeal >> "Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of >> those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do." -- Bigby Wolf >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> fossil-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users >> > > _______________________________________________ > fossil-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users >
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