Version control poll!

For sure I think I must be genuinely missing something here. Normally I'm confident enough that it's just the industry talking toss, but here I can't see that this many people would praise something without there being some value, but I don't see it. Can someone explain?

(e.g. 'allows private work' - my amazing hard drive allows me to do that!)
Yes, but git allows you to commit offline -- instead of yr repository being on a server, it's stored locally, so you can do everything you would -- branch, merge, commit, revert etc on your ownsome, and if you want it stored somewhere else, you push it up to them.

I prefer that to subversion because I can make my local sandbox a total pigsty without the "good" server copy becoming a mess as well. I imagine that'd be handy if you were dealing with lots of developers too -- they can have local branches, then merge back and push. Or other people can pull from their copies to work on their changes, etc.

There's a guy at work, who is a total genius, and his three questions are:

- So what?
- Who cares?
- Why now?

And what I can't figure about the being able to "commit offline" (which I'm not sure what means) I think I would ask the first two questions about. Can't you just not pollute the repository by kind of not committing?

By committing offline, I mean you can be entirely offline -- no connection to the server at all -- and still have the full version control set of commands going on. When you commit, it's not sent to a remote server, it's just incorporated locally.

That's where it's different from polluting the repository simply by not committing: you can do lots of commits, reverts etc, but it doesn't affect anyone else or the repository (though there isn't really such a thing under git) until you push those changes out.

So what?

Sorry. Just asking the question. What's good about that? How does it make it so much better?

The guy who asks these questions reported to SD we were talking about earlier... He's a switched on guy.

Well, under subversion if you're not polluting the repository by committing, you're left to basically do your version control by hand -- if you don't commit to the server, your changes aren't being stored so you can't revert. With git you can snapshot your state at any time, revert to it, and so on, all in private. xp

Oh OK, assuming your development environment doesn't let you roll back stuff, then that would be true. I suppose Deano doing vim development would appreciate this.

and all the RoR/Textmate crew :)

That's true. There are lots of tools that would help them out.

But I suppose it would result in just developing the same things but in a different place. It probably is inevitable. I've come to conclude that people don't learn from history.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

version control is ~great~

> I suppose Deano doing vim development would appreciate this.
> ― Keith, Saturday, 2 August 2008 01:30 (3 years ago)

you what what?