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Getting into Version Control
Jamie Phelps | Jan 4 2008
Short Version:I think it's high time I got my act together and started using version control for my web design and programming work. Two questions I'd like you to answer: How do you/should I go about making version control part of my working process? and What is a good version control system for my needs? (I have been overwhelmed by all the strangeties of SVN in the past.) The first question is the most important for me as I can pretty much adjust to most anything. Longer version after the jump... Long Version:Here's the thing. Many of you know that I'm a web designer. What I'm here to admit today is that heretofore I have not been using a version control system. I have some new projects about to start up as well as some pretty ambitious programming projects that I'll be working on over the next semester and in my last year of school working on a big group project. So, I thought now would be a great time to get my act together with version control. My work obviously requires that I do a fair amount with binary files such as images and occasionally sound. So, any version control system would need to handle that stuff gracefully. I'd also like for whatever system to integrate in some capacity with Finder. I'm not averse to the command line, but switching to Terminal to do version control operations is one more step that I fear might keep me from actually using it. I have my hosting account with Dreamhost, which offers ootb SVN repositories, so that might be the simplest solution. Also, and help with workflow issues such as dealing with multiple projects (multiple repositories or one repository with multiple projects?) is greatly appreciated. As a way of sort of getting into my head with this stuff, it might help if I describe my modus operandi for a project. All of my project folders get treated like a "document" and shoved into my catch-all "~/Documents/trunk" folder and organized by color label. (See also my blog post about organizing my files. Most of my web design projects consist of a simple top level directory with three sub directories for images, javascript, and stylesheets. In the past, if I was going to get experimental with a particular aspect, I'd just make a _bak copy of the file in question and go to work. Not too sophisticated. My programming projects go into ~/Code/$languagename/$projectname, so for my class programming assignments, ~/Code/Java/ProjectName. Again, nothing to earth-shattering. But I did want to show that I do keep my projects separated more than just by project. Maybe I should be keeping my web design projects in ~/Sites. Ach, but I digress... Finally, I think I have been overwhelmed by the alien concepts in SVN. Branches? Tags? Trunk? WTF? So, perhaps a simpler system is in order. I know Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar are the cool new kids, but is there something else out there that I'm not considering? Thanks in advance as always for your help, 43F Hive Mind. 53 Comments
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 SVN or GITSubmitted by sundown on January 5, 2008 - 12:15am.
My main piece of advice is use what's good for you. Try them. Git will both import and export svn so you're not locked in once you start. SVN is one of the most commonly used system, so it's good to learn. GIT is probably a sign of things to come, so it's probably also a good thing to learn. As a web designer, the important thing you might want to learn is trigger scripts with either SVN or GIT. Trigger scripts are scripts run when specific events occur, like a commit. The obvious use of such scripts for the web is to have the trigger script update your website every time you commit. I do this for one of my web sites and it's great not having to manually update the site after each commit. to craig: I use svn for things beyond programming. Here are a few examples:
You just need to be careful in terms of diffing files (finding the difference). Many file formats do not have a supported method to diff them. Text files are the easiest to diff. Some apps have specialized diffing tools, such as Word. If you can live with the diffing options for the files, and it's work you plan to do progressively or collaboratively, version control might work for the project. » POSTED IN:
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