Source control for temporary projects

[jack]

It really is ridiculous how much more stuff I get done when I'm on a roll. I admit I haven't always been good at putting everything in source control, especially little bits that somehow don't feel like planned projects. But I'm here to assure you that it is always worth it.

I finally set up a subversion repository on my home machine for the flash game (and anything else). Installing subversion and tortoise_svn (graphical client #1) took literally less than five minutes, and paid for itself in productivity in the *next* five minutes, which I swear would have taken an hour otherwise. Do it. Put the text documents in there as well.

Flash's action-script is not 100% the most convenient language. But you *can* rip it out of the flash file and nestedly #include it, allowing simple flicking back and forth between dev vesion and release version, orthogonal development of game logic and level design, etc. Rock on.

Comments

[simont]

I'd tend to agree that the initial writing of a large program is probably the time in its life cycle when it least needs source control, particularly if it's done fast so that all the state is still in your head. My largest ever program, for example, had its initial version written at around the time I was just beginning to hear about source control, and given its subsequent popularity it doesn't seem to me that it suffered unduly.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't have liked to have source control available even during that stage, if I'd known about it. It makes some things so much easier, such as filling your program full of temporary diagnostics to track down a subtle bug and knowing you've got rid of them all again once you've solved it...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ooh, putty icon.

Hmm, yes, arguably. The less you're changing things and the more you're adding things to something which wasn't known to work, the less important. But: some good people just seem to have a plough-ahead approach, regardless of the task at hand. I don't know if they'd do better if they used source control, etc, well, or if something in the way they work is antithetical to it.