Re: About single user setup for lightweights

From: Ben Finney <ben+bazaar@benfinney.id.au>
Date: Mar 19, 2010, 04:01 UTC
Message-ID: <87y6hpufi3.fsf@benfinney.id.au>
In-Reply-To: <87r5nht6uf.fsf@newsguy.com>

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> Hold your fire on this one if possible. I'm not just a lazy slug who
> can't think and study for himself.

Hopefully you're in for a smooth ride; I'd be disappointed if any of these communities are hostile to an honest and specific enquiry like yours.

Welcome, and thanks for learning about modern VCS options!

> I'm a little confused about the different way of using rcs that git,
> mercurial bazaar and probably several others offer.

I got a bit confised by that sentence. You would do well to use “VCS” (Version Control System) to refer to the class of program. “RCS” refers to a particular VCS, one that is still in current use for some purposes.

> I've not used anything but cvs.  I use it at least every couple of
> days but really only a limited set of commands, and no deep knowledge
> even of that style.

Good news; you'll have little un-learning to do :-)

> My usage is basically to keep up with rc files for the several OSs' I
> tinker with

[…]

> To me, keeping up with cvs is always a PITA.  I've never hit on a
> handy and efficient way to do it. Even for a just my light usage.

I don't know what “keep up with CVS” means. Can you explain what part of your workflow is a PITA?

> How would a workflow actually go:
> I'd create and populate a repo, then what?.

You could choose which files should be common between different machines, add those to the repository and choose not to track the rest in the VCS. Other ways of doing it are also feasible.

> Create clones on each machine I guess and if I found a need to change
> or add files, I'd then push back to the original repo? Its sounding a
> whole lot like cvs so far.

> So, am I likely to see some improvement in the chore of keeping up an
> [VCS] system with git, mercurial or bazaar?

Pending an explanation of what “keeping up” means, I think one of the big benefits you'll get is that the modern VCS designs:

* treat the whole working tree as the thing to be represented in each
  revision; and

* have significantly better merging capability compared with CVS.

> Anther thing I'm really curious about concerns binary rcs. I'm
> thinking of photo editing and things like flash where I might be
> changing a project over time and want access to past versions.

You can do this with any VCS, but binary files don't have a good generic way to represent differences efficiently, whereas text files do. So tracking binary files will work, but will be rather inefficient in terms of memory usage and repository data.

-- 
 \         “If you can do no good, at least do no harm.” —_Slapstick_, |
  `\                                                     Kurt Vonnegut |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney