Slashdot Mirror

I second this. At first I tried using a sync solution in .net/mono made by Novell, the name escapes me at the moment. It was dodgy at best. Then I tried using unison.

Then I realized I had a subversion repository, and just shoved all of my work documents in it. No huge binary files aside from the occasional giant word document and PDF. It works fairly well and handles all my needs.

Were I do to it again from scratch, i'd probably use Bazaar or git. The ability to push and pull my local repos everywhere it is needed would be useful, but right now I don't mind syncing with a centralized master. I have had very little conflicts over the years, except when I did stupid things like do my Quickbooks invoices in a rush on random machines. Changes were difficult to reconcile, but that would have been a problem no matter what solution I would have used.

We do this for many many Drupal sites on many horizontal web nodes via bzr + ant. By 'sites' I mean no multi-site; each 'site' gets its own Drupal instance. By 'Drupal instance', I mean the 'Drupal instance' is an ant-powered deploy from a branch in bzr comprised of vendor branches (core + modules) merged in plus customizations by our shop. Each environment gets a branch, and we merge code upstream (dev -> tst -> prd).

The only thing 'shared' across the infrastructure is the web services and frameworks on the webapp nodes. Ant is great at auto-magic MySQL db provisioning, Drush calls to pound the schema, APC cache flushes, Memcached bops, etc. Also I would throw myself off a bridge if I had to manage all the complex merges across our branches and dealing with updating the vendor branches.

Others here also made the comment wrt code up, content down. Live it, love it; SERIOUSLY! Refresh often, and give your devs anonymized slices of the db for them to keep on a laptop they will undoubtedly leave in a cab. Were currently bending ant to perform the downstream refreshes + sanitizes. Looks very promising.

Also if youre not able to bastardize ant to do what you want it to do, look at ant-contrib to further extend the tool.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/en/
http://ant.apache.org/
http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/

Slightly OT: The J2EE guys at $employer prefer a maven+ant+svn approach. YMMV.

Have fun. These are very interesting toys to play with, tbh.

Indeed, I was wondering about Bazaar (bzr) in particular. TFA assumes "Each tool emphasizes a distinct approach to working and collaboration, which in turn influences how the team works."

But the very first line on http://bazaar-vcs.org/ states: "Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works. While other systems require you to adapt to their model of working, Bazaar adapts to the way you want to work, and you can try it out in five minutes."

An overview of different possible workflows is given on this page. The most simple solutions don't need a server at all, you can use a centralized repo like svn/cvs, or more complicated distributed setups (like with git/hg) are possible.

Indeed, I was wondering about Bazaar (bzr) in particular. TFA assumes "Each tool emphasizes a distinct approach to working and collaboration, which in turn influences how the team works."

But the very first line on http://bazaar-vcs.org/ states: "Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works. While other systems require you to adapt to their model of working, Bazaar adapts to the way you want to work, and you can try it out in five minutes."

An overview of different possible workflows is given on this page. The most simple solutions don't need a server at all, you can use a centralized repo like svn/cvs, or more complicated distributed setups (like with git/hg) are possible.

How can no one have mentioned Bazaar http://bazaar-vcs.org/ yet? For me, it's a great compromise between having my eyes and brain bleeding from being forced to use the atrocity that is git (or CVS come to think of it, which I'm still stuck with at work), and all the quirks and issues with Subversion.

It works the same on Linux and Windows , has a TortoiseBZR GUI for Windows, and is very flexible in just about all respects. Sure it's written in Python and is a tad slow. If your project is big and complex enough for that to matter, you already know that and are using git or whatever. For everyone else it's great.

Bazaar http://bazaar-vcs.org/ does not require a dedicated server.. maybe this would be better than svn?

For *large files* (like Ubuntu images) I use http://www.krusader.org/ to make backups or copy them somewhere on demand, but for *small, hand-written files* like configs, notes and scripts, I use http://bazaar-vcs.org/.

An example of my workflow would look rather ugly in this comment, so have a look here instead: http://blag.felixhummel.de/junk/slashdot_2009-06-24.html

Use Mercurial or Bzr:

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
http://bazaar-vcs.org/

They are obscure and scary, but have much lower start up costs than subversion (and they aren't that hard to use), and compared to a hypothetical system, they are available today.

For those who don't think about version control systems every day, when he says "bzr" he is talking about Bazaar, the VCS Mark Shuttleworth supported for Canonical because he didn't like the other VCS.

"The documentation is far from perfect."

Unfortunately, Canonical is supporting the usual Open Source tradition of communicating poorly, forcing everyone to use weeks of their time to learn something new, instead of having one person spend weeks writing good documentation. In a lot of ways, Canonical is just the same old pig, wearing a bit of lipstick.

Bazaar will let you work as if it were Subversion, for example, with a central server, lightweight local checkouts (with no history).

It will also let the same group of people work offline. Or heavyweight checkouts that can be offline, but commit to the server by default.

See here for more about workflows from the simple to the involved.

I found the Bazaar system to be superior to all other version control systems I have tried, including subversion and GIT.

http://bazaar-vcs.org/

Why? It is fast, it has tools integration and it can be used in much the same way as subversion/CVS. It is much easier to learn and just as powerful as something like GIT.

There might be reasons to use GIT for extreme projects like the Linux kernel, but I believe Bazaar will do just fine for all reasonably sized projects.

Wow! I just looked at Bazaar.

Things I noticed:

Bazaar developers are very good writers. They explain things very well.

A lot of things they say make good sense to me. (Bazaar versus Git)

Wow! I just looked at Bazaar.

Things I noticed:

Bazaar developers are very good writers. They explain things very well.

A lot of things they say make good sense to me. (Bazaar versus Git)

1. Upstart, which, except for the kernel, is about as low-level as you can go.
2. Storm, since Ubuntu loves Python.
3. Bazaar, a revision control system used in Launchpad.

They released Bazaar with a promise to release Launchpad later.

Why are you so upset? Launchpad is their private code, it disgusts me that you seem to think you have some god given right to take anything anyone writes on top of Linux.

Instead of praise for what they have done with sharing bug reports, translations, bzr and attempting to contribute back as much as possible.. no instead you scorn them because you didn't get your free lunch with launchpad.

If Linus had used one of the many tools available at the time instead of ignoring them for his friend Larry's proprietary solution, the free tools would have quickly improved to meet the needs of the community. Instead, he snubbed the community and did his part to set back distributed revision control systems for years. And he's still doing it. In most every way bzr is superior to git but Linus refused to be a part of the community and toots his own horn instead. The result is projects like WINE who use git for revision control but don't have even slightly the same workflow as the Linux kernel, so they rampantly complain about contributions not being manageable (just try to contribute something to WINE and you'll see what I mean). Linus has no just wasted his own time by flirting with Bitkeeper and rolling his own solution (that is good for only his needs) but he's also wasted everyone else's time because, for some unknown reason, people keep listening to him.

Yes, you could use svk... but why, when its competition is easier to use or faster and more space-efficient and has useful things like dumb server support?