Re: philosophical question about frequent saving of files

On Aug 26, 2005, at 1:11 PM, Ivan Soleimanipour wrote:

> With this suggestion of yours tor you'd have the immediate
> undo/redo, your save scheme and the VCS based save scheme.
>
> Just more stuff to manage, terminology etc. Do
> we really need more technological solutions?
>
> In any case, isn't it the case that with SCCS/teamware (as opposed to
> CVS) "experiment" gmgmt is easir because of the local repository?

It may be easier, but I don't want my file revisions individually  
checked in. Everytime I check in a change, I provide an explanation/ 
commit message for that change. This is inherently different than the  
undo history.  I always do a diff of what I'm about to check in too  
as a final step.

>
> Also, NB's editor undoes past file saves, but that begs the question
> of when it stops (or should stop).

I really think this (local file versions) is a different feature.   
And note that I'm not innovating -- other IDEs already do this. In  
JBuilder for example there's a versioning tab you can switch to and  
see available recent file versions, listed by the date stamp of when  
they were saved.

I don't remember the details, but one of the important things you do  
in this window is diff one version wrt. another. So if for example  
something you were working on suddenly stopped working, you can diff  
this version with previous versions over the last couple of hours and  
notice that perhaps you accidentally deleted a line or something.

It would be nice too if operations which cause a Save on a file could  
annotate the version history. E.g. in addition to normal "Ctrl-S"  
revisions for when you've saved the file yourself, if you hit the Fix  
& Continue button the revision would be labeled the Fix & Continue  
rev, if you did a refactoring, the revision would be annotated  
"Refactor: Rename Foo to Bar", etc. But now I'm dreaming.

-- Tor