The Dopefly Tech Blog

« The Dopefly Tech Blog Main page

Save your life in subversion

posted under category: General on February 22, 2007 by Nathan

A few years ago, I read a story on Slashdot about a guy who saved his linux home directory in CVS.

Today, John Blayter mentioned someone doing exactly that but only with their Eclipse install.

What an interesting idea, I thought. I could save my plugin configuration and my workspace folder in subversion. I can roll back when things get screwed up, and commit when I make a good change. Ahh, but what about hacking at home versus at work? How about a branch for each? Maybe work will be the main trunk and I would be able to merge changes from home while rebasing changes from work. When I install a plugin, I can make a new branch for it to see if I like it. If I do, I can roll it back into the trunk and rebase with the home branch. If not, I can drop the branch and roll back to the trunk. I can track different eclipse versions and test compatibility with my other plugins. This really could solve a number of problems.

I'm not sure I would do it. I don't currently have a place to hold my entire Eclipse setup, with versions. But the idea is something to think about, for sure.

Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
This blog is also available as an RSS 2.0 feed. Click your heels together and click here to contact Nathan.