Organizing your programming

[MamaSpoldi]

Originally Posted by virtuald

Yeah, disconnected operations as you describe sounds really annoying and is exactly why we don't use SVN. Here's our workflow at competitions:

• I create a bare git repo on a flash drive (cd /path/to/drive; git init --bare NAME)
• We set up remotes on each students computer to push to the flash drive (git remote add usb /path/to/drive/NAME)
• They do their normal development stuff, commits, branches, stash, etc
• When one of them wants to push code, they plug in the flash drive and do "git push usb BRANCH"
• When someone wants to pull from the flash drive, they do "git pull usb BRANCH"
• At the end of the day, I bring the flash drive home and push the commits up to git -- it's great, keeps history, no folders to keep track of -- and if someone screws something up, a 'git reset --hard HASH' allows us to go back to a known working state

Sure, git has a learning curve. But its advantages are numerous -- particularly in a disconnected environment.

The advantage of our operations at competition (the "disconnected" operations as you describe them) is that I can view the files on any computer... and we have an automatic backup if something should happen to our programming laptop. This gives us the ability to quickly recreate our environment and software on another system if it becomes necessary. And I don't need specialized tools to access the files. Sorry, I'm old-fashioned and I don't really trust the cloud as my sole backup.

[virtuald]

Not to have a VCS war here but...

Originally Posted by MamaSpoldi

I can view the files on any computer

When checked out at rest on a computer, all the files are there just like SVN and can be seen without special tools. I can copy directories too if I wanted to, but don't need to.

... and we have an automatic backup if something should happen to our programming laptop.

We do one better -- since git's local repo is a complete copy of the repository + history, each repo on each student's computer has complete history, and the flash drive does too. And development at the competition is almost exactly how we do development at home -- just pushing to a flash drive instead of to github.

Also, I can use git diff to figure out exactly what changes were made.

This gives us the ability to quickly recreate our environment and software on another system if it becomes necessary. And I don't need specialized tools to access the files.

Well, if you had a completely raw system with no development tools on it, you would need to install Eclipse+compile tools or LabView. So from that perspective, it's just an extra piece of software you need to have installed. So we're still even.

To answer the original OP's question: At the end of the day, one needs to have a process that works for your team so you can do development at home and at the competition. For teams using text-based languages and more than one team member -- there are a lot of different ways to do it -- but use a version control system of some kind, and don't try to roll your own. There are a lot of opinions on which one is best -- but there's a good reason why distributed VCS such as git and mercurial have been hugely popular since their introduction.

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by MamaSpoldi

Sorry, I'm old-fashioned and I don't really trust the cloud as my sole backup.

Oh, missed that one. One more comment and then I'll shut up...

TL;DR: With SVN, you rely more on the cloud than when using git.

With SVN, to do any operation you *must* have a server involved (eg, the cloud -- even if it's your own personal cloud!). Otherwise if you have no connection to the server, you cannot use any of the normal SVN tools -- they all require a connection to the server. svn log? need a server. svn commit? need a server. svn update? need a server. And if the server isn't available, then you have to go back to the old way of copying files around by hand until the server is available.

With git, I can do all of the normal operations without a server ever getting involved, ever. commit, push, pull, diff, whatever. No cloud required. 100% local.