Recorded Virtual User Group on Team-Based Development and Source Code Control

[Elijah_K]

I've been eager to compose a new blog entry on a wide variety of topics, but I've resigned myself to the reality that I won't have time until I'm back from traveling in mid-November.  In the meantime, I did want to pass along a link to a recent online user group presentation that I gave, entitled: Source Code Control and Team Based Development Best Practices.  It covers the use of TortoiseSVN (Subversion) with LabVIEW, as well as source-only and the use of the VI Package Manager. 

Cheers,

Eli

PS: I apologize in advance for the audio - seems my mic was a little too close.

[sth]

Very nice.  I am one of those who makes multiple backups and has an ad hoc system.  I really think that I need to do this.  I think you made your point.  At least to me.

Two questions/comments

I am curious that git has such a low demand.  It is a system that has very good and growing support away from subversion.  Many projects I know of and participate in have moved from svn at souceforge to git at github solely to get git support.

Second is my usual cross platform question.  What SVN GUI do you recommend for OS X?  Or anyone else in this group?  There are a couple of free GUIs and some paid but I haven't seen a comparison or list of folks trying them out.  And how well do they interface with LV SCC and JKI right click framework?  I know svn is built into OS X and git is easy to install but these are command line functions.

Thanks again, very nice thorough presentation.

-Scott

[rolfk]

To me it's not so surprising that git hasn't found as a high demand than for instance SVN. I have dabbled at a few open source projects using git and found the experience a bit intimidating. git is very powerful but has also a rather unintuitive command syntax to use. I'm sure one can learn it and dream git if one works daily with it, but for me source code control is simply a tool that I use during the actual development, not a ZEN yoga session for its own sake. There are graphical interfaces to git but none, not even the TortoiseGIT one manages to make its use as trivial than TortoiseSVN for instance. And that is most likely not the fault of the tool, but simply caused by the very powerfull possibilities of git.

Moving away from sf.net for the pure use of git seems a bit useless as sf.net has git support (together with Mercurial and Bazaar) since somewhere around early 2009.

[sth]

Rolf,

I agree that sf.net has git but that doesn't seem to be the decision now for a couple of projects.  I am a peripheral contributer and not central to those decisions.  I am more commenting on what I have seen rather than why.  Like most tools designed by and for software engineers they are not as intuitive as they could be.  I find SVN a bit easier to remember but still have to read the man page.  Thus we hope for the GUI interface and the simple integration with whatever storage system strikes your fancy.

There are certain common functions for all of these (and mecurial as well though I haven't used it).  Maybe middle ware that exposes a core suite of functions to LabVIEW for SCC and then backends to interface to each package.  Also then a suite of optional functionality that is specific to the packages could be added.

Tortoise SVN is good but it seems that the interface is now specific to that one GUI as an interface.  It doesn't support basic SVN but only supports a specific GUI for SVN.  This is a big lock-in and loss of generality.