Re: philosophical question about frequent saving of files

> Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:13:50 -0700
> From: Richard Bair <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [nbui] philosophical question about frequent saving of files
> 

> >Tor, if you're distracted by your cell phone or IRC so much that
> >you can't program, why not toss your cellphone and shut down the IRC?
> >  
> >
> Come on Ivan, no need to be so arrogant. Perhaps you haven't discovered 
> the many useful purposes that the telephone and IRC bring to the 
> development process. That doesn't mean you have to be rude to Tor.
> 


First you imply that I'm lazy, now you're calling me arrogant.
Oooookaaay.

What I said to Tor was that if "too much distraction" is you problem,
the solution isn't more gadgets, it's less distraction.
How's that for a no-brainer?


> 
> >Why not replace the "royal pain" instead of tacking on more technology?
> >
> >sccs is quite low-overhead and doesn't require "buy-in" to something
> >complex like CVS or subversion; it can be used personally. Or
> >you can use rcs the same way. Then if you want to participate in a
> >full-fledged VCS you can.
> >Note how sccs/rcs etc evolved from personal backup systems originally
> >written in shells and even as textbook examples of complex shell 
> >programs. 
> >  
> >
> Do you actually expect users to _change their VCS_? Do you actually 
> think that encouraging developers to stop using CVS or Subversion is 
> going to happen? Do you expect the tens of thousands of open source 
> projects that currently use CVS (sometimes because their hosting company 
> *cough* Collabnet *cough* uses CVS and there isn't anything you can do 
> about it?) to switch to SCCS?
> 
> Auto-saving and (more importantly) local versioning is a no-brainer.

Yes, it is a no-brainer, but that's why it makes me want to pause and think
a bit more about it.

So I've been thinking ... we work in "waves" ... in each wave we touch
multiple files. CVS "tags" attempt to capture this notion;
teamware doesn't have anything to help this; bitkeeper does.

For example, 
Now I"m working on persisten bpts.
Now I'm working on bpt XML saving and restoring.
...
(As opposed to I just did a build or I just did a fix)

So are the waves of work that do make it under src control any different than
the personal waves? If you record information about a wave for
the personal backup mechanism will that info seamlessly make it to 
the checkin comments? 
technically there's no reason to store personal backup past a checkin,
so as you go through your personal backup history will you be able to
seamlessly continue through VCS history?
Will diffing two personal backups be the same as diffing two deltas?