bliki tagged by: version control
BranchByAbstraction
A term coined by Paul Hammant to describe a technique for making structural changes to a code-base without a FeatureBranch in a source-code control system. For details take a look at the descriptions by Jez Humble and Paul Hammant.
FeatureBranch
With the rise of Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as git and Mercurial, I've seen more conversations about strategies for branching and merging and how they fit in with Continuous Integration (CI). There's a bit of confusion here, particularly on the practice of feature branching and how it fits in with CI.
3 September 2009
MoreVersionControl
As someone who uses version control all the time, I think it's something that can grow into more areas of computer use. Other than software developers, few computer users use version control. Yet as software developers know, version control is a great mechanism for collaborative work, allowing multiple people to work together on a single software system. What would be the benefits of version control being more widely used?
6 December 2004
PervasiveVersioning
Recently Apple announced the Time Machine, which is the ability to go back in time and see all the alterations to your files, including finding deleted files. For some of us intense geeks, this is not a new feature. Like others, I put my entire working directory under version control, originally CVS now Subversion, and have thus had the ability to easily look at all the changes to everything I work on. It's such a useful feature that I've wondered before about what it would be like to have MoreVersionControl, and perhaps Time Machine is a step in that direction.
21 August 2006
SemanticDiff
Most version control systems rely on using and understanding the changes between versions of artifacts - often referred to as diffs from the command that can produce them in Unix. Good diff (and merge) algorithms are around for text and binary files. The trouble with these diffs is that they are rather dumb. All they do is look at the two artifact versions and generate a simple way of getting from one to another.
VcsSurvey
When I discussed VersionControlTools I said that it was an unscientific agglomeration of opinion. As I was doing it I realized that I could add some spurious but mesmerizing numbers to my analysis by doing a survey. Google's spreadsheet makes the mechanics of conducting a survey really simple, so I couldn't resist.
8 March 2010
DiffDebugging
I was working on some example code for one of my writing projects recently when I ran into a failing test. "Ouch", I thought, "those tests were passing last week - what happened?" Rather than trying to find the bug in the code in front of me, I used what I think I'd like to call diff debugging.
1 June 2004
MercurialSquashCommit
I've recently had a bit of a fiddle squashing some commits with Mercurial, so thought it was worth a post in case anyone else is looking to do this. I don't know whether this is the best procedure, but it seemed to work pretty well for me.
9 July 2009
PendingHead
I'm a big fan of Continuous Integration, it's an relatively simple practice that can make a huge difference to most development teams. However like most practices it has its flaws^H^H^H^H^H opportunities for improvement. Paul Duvall, author of the soon-to-be-standard book on the subject, pointed out one of these recently. If the commit build breaks, the whole team is affected and potentially slowed until it's fixed.
26 April 2007
ReproducibleBuild
One of the prevailing assumptions that fans of Continuous Integration have is that builds should be reproducible. By this we mean that at any point you should be able to take some older version of the system that you are working on and build it from source in exactly the same way as you did then.
30 November 2010
Subversion
Subversion is the an open-source version control system - in essence a successor to CVS. It fixes the biggest issues with CVS, introducing such things as atomic commits and support for file and directory renaming. I've been using it for a couple of years and have found it very solid.
VersionControlTools
If you spend time talking to software developers about tools, one of the biggest topics I hear about are version control tools. Once you've got to the point of using version control tools, and any competent developers does, then they become a big part of your life. Version tools are not just important for maintaining a history of a project, they are also the foundation for a team to collaborate. So it's no surprise that I hear frequent complaints about poor version control tools. In our recent ThoughtWorks technology radar, we called out two items as version control tools that enterprises should be assessing for use: Subversion and Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS). Here I want to expand on that, summarizing many discussions we've had internally about version control tools.
17 February 2010