Other Things

This is just to give a update on what i have been doing. Although it was not on the AoI fluids plugin. But it is not forgotten, and if i ever do abandon it, I will release a full source version. Remember I want this plugin too. Your feed back was read and will be reread, so its not wasted.

So what have i been doing. Well I been to New Zealand and back. I have got a contract in the wings that means I can stay in Austria for another 2 years (maybe I will learn some German?). I have noted my lack of ability to Get Things Done, found a book with that title and I am finding it really helps to, well get things done.

Last but not least I have migrated all my code from subversion to Git. Oh what a joy git is compared to cvs and svn.

Its interesting how I found out about Git. I started using CVS for everything in about 1995-7 (can't remember exactly as I cleaned and reset my repository in 2000). I was not that impressed. I could not do a lot of the things I wanted to like move files. Binarys was not well handled and some things were far slower than I thought they should be. I did try a merge from a branch once.... and only once...

Then I ended up working for some companies that used source safe. Now I hate working on windows at the best of time. Nothing personal, I just find that MS support and documentation is terrible compared to other companies I have worked with. But what the Hell was MS thinking with source safe? Surely they didn't use it in house? To make a bad tool worse, the company I was working with had very stupid polices regarding file locking.

To make a long story short, I fell in love with CVS because she was the prettiest girl at the party. Not because she was pretty.

I kept looking for a better way because there must be a better way. Hence I found subversion. I have now used it for about 3 years. The problem is that its not really a better way, but the same way. Combined with the tools in IDE's (eclipse mainly but netbeans as well) my repository kept getting into limbo states preventing commits. It was difficult to fix without a complicated rolling backup system. Further to that problem, which directly affected the fluid plugin, was that I would end up out of sync with home all the time (I had no internet).

It was the fluid plugin devlopment that got me thinking that my personal devlopment model was in fact distributed. It didn't take long to find git. Unfortunately the admin at work never would give me a time when he would install it at work. So i waited until our machines got upgraded which was last week. Now all my repositories have been transfered to git. I don't use IDE tools for version control anymore since they just don't work that well. But with git is does not matter because the checked out directory is clean.

So why Git? Here is my list.

• Distributed development.
• Fast, very very fast.
• Merges work so branching becomes common. This means there is better history too.
• Unix tool set.
  
• Very good repository integrity checking. This is a big deal IMO.
  
• Easy to use (edit) configuration file.
  
• Frequent branching makes "frozen" release much easier to manage. Debugging on the frozen branch can be easily merged with the main devlopment trunk.

The is even some tools to import a subversion repository with history. So I still have a history back to 2000. In short, even if you are a solo developer I would still recommend Git first and distributed version control over everything else.