next »

[Geti]

That sounds more or less like normal version control practice - have a central repository for one project. That still happens with distributed version control, just every "user" (ie all your different machines) also keeps the history of the repository and can create local branches and as many commits of the code as they like, independently of the "central" repository.
The main side effect of this is you develop good version control habits, and the workflow extends naturally to team collaboration too.

...Man we are not grumpy enough in here at the moment. Could be a good idea to move this to another thread if you want to learn more, or just install git or mercurial and start using them.

[Sir Wolf]

Well I'm grumpy because I'm working in an organisation that uses SVN. We've joked about getting a "I broke the repository" hat that would be passed along to the latest person SVN decides to mess with, I'm keeping my eyes open for a suitable one I'll purchase and bring to work one one day.

[Dacke]

Kekeskiller, sure, it's completely normal to work on different parts of the project on different devices. The nice thing about git and hg is that merging, branching and committing is extremely fast and quite simple. So you don't have to be completely done with something before you push it to the main repository. You can just put it in a temporary branch on the server (for safe keeping) and then merge it into master when it's finished.

[ThemsAllTook]

Well I'm grumpy because I'm working in an organisation that uses SVN. We've joked about getting a "I broke the repository" hat that would be passed along to the latest person SVN decides to mess with

Weird, svn has always worked extremely well for me. I've been using it both professionally and on my own projects for several years and never had the issues you guys are describing. It sounds like the main problem is the vulnerability of having just one central place where the repository lives? It seems to me like consistent backups would solve this just as well as using a distributed version control system. I'm not at all convinced of the benefits of git/etc. over svn.

[Sir Wolf]

Weird, svn has always worked extremely well for me. I've been using it both professionally and on my own projects for several years and never had the issues you guys are describing. It sounds like the main problem is the vulnerability of having just one central place where the repository lives? It seems to me like consistent backups would solve this just as well as using a distributed version control system. I'm not at all convinced of the benefits of git/etc. over svn.

It very well could be just the fact that we are relatively inexperienced devs. The phrase "DON'T COMMIT OR UPDATE RIGHT NOW, I BROKE SOMETHING" can be heard at the offices maybe a few times a week. I guess using a distributed VC would help with that as only the user's local repository would get messed up. It doesn't help that we're developing with Unity, which from our experience doesn't play well with VC in general.

Personally I do feel like things are much easier with Git, especially using branches feels much more convenient there. It could be both a confirmation bias (I had been assured SVN is much worse than Git before I used either) and that I'm just more used to Git so naturally using it is going to be easier to me. Then there is of course the fact that I've mostly used Git with solo projects and with one partner, and SVN with teams larger than that.

[Kekskiller]

I'll give git a try and check whether it suits me better. I still have my SVN so I can try both with whatever stuff I wanna do.

Let's get back to something grumpy: CruiseControl.NET! I hate this dum pile of garbage. The only really worthwhile part is the Visual Studio build block and the webdashboard. Everything else sucks ass and I've written small replacements in batch that worked nicer and more stable than CC.NET.

[Eraser]

This might not exactly be technical, but it took me over a month and a lost chance at $500 from a promo from YYG. When running my game for Windows Phone within GameMaker, the game worked fine. When I created the final build, it would crash after the splash screen.

The problem? The default file name has dashes and periods in the final release build (and I did not change the file name), and that apparently causes a crash. I stumbled across this idea on a whim after noticing that the temporary package created by GM when pressing the run button did not have hyphens or periods.

Fuck me. 

[Geti]

It sounds like the main problem is the vulnerability of having just one central place where the repository lives?

That and not being able to work properly offline (no commit since no access to the central repo), teamwork being less comfortable (see above "don't commit, I broke stuff", as well as remote file locking leading to angry emails, and not file locking leading to people clobbering each other's code).

Not having a local repository is the main thing for me.

Having to append your own backup solution to SVN to not risk losing your entire repository history is just a hack, imo. DVCS has all my history locally and remotely, by default, without me doing anything.

Of course, SVN does get the job done, but I don't think it's worth using something that works when there's something that works better available for free - especially for something I use as frequently as my VCS. I might be soured by our experience with an SVN repo dying, but I kinda think thats a valid reason to be mad at something designed to protect revision history.


@MindEraser: that sucks. My condolences.

[Dacke]

The big think for me is how small the footprint of a git/hg repo is. Being able to use it locally for every little project, with a single command-line command, makes it so incredibly versatile. (Also: git-blame and git-bisect!)

On the grumpy front though:
You can actually get cascading repo collapses with git. I think you need to go out of the way to expose yourself to such risks, but it is a possibility. So you may want to keep back-ups for important projects anyway. I don't, but I think that I probably should, maybe.

See The Great KDE Disaster of 2013 where they almost lost all of their 1500 repos due to a file-system error in one place and a badly designed mirror-system.

[BleakProspects]

My AI kept crashing, so I wrote a little thing to print out AI debug messages and display some info. Then that kept crashing, so I just opened up the general code debugger to figure out why my AI debug messages were causing a crash. That led me to solve the original problem I was trying to find ... which leads me to the question: why did I write the message printer anyway?

[Quarry]

I manually entered all the kerning values while I could automate it...

It took me a whole hour

[Dr. Cooldude]

I manually entered all the kerning values while I could automate it...

It took me a whole hour

Something similar happened to me a long time ago (think it was XNA). Doing all that manual keming is annoying.

[Quarry]

oh u

[Schrompf]

My graphics artist just told me he won't be able to deliver the final boss graphics in the next few weeks. Well... there goes the release next week.

[Kekskiller]

STL for Visual C++. I'll beat the fucken dumbass to near-death who implemented it. With his own dick. Roasted.

[Dr. Cooldude]

STL for Visual C++. I'll beat the fucken dumbass to near-death who implemented it. With his own dick. Roasted.

[Kekskiller]

He can keep the nuts. His dick belongs to me.

[Dr. Cooldude]

lol. I haven't used C++ for a while now, what's wrong with VC++'s STL interpretation?

[Kekskiller]

It's an abomination of mankind only matched by the last breath of dying species.

[Geti]

We swapped to EA's STL a while ago. So far so good. Felt like a deal with the devil and yet another dependency, but it's as portable as we need and many, many times faster, especially in debug mode.

I'd appreciate less genital mutilation chatter though.