Subversion

Holy crap, making my life easier. I don't know why I didn't ever bother to set up subversion for work before, but I spent a couple hours today doing it, and I'm totally amazed at how easy this stuff is going to make my life. In general, I worked through a combination of editing using vim on the server, and using SubEthaEdit locally (especially for files which require different encodings that I don't know how to deal with in vim.) However, Subversion is going to completely negate the need for copying files around manually.

A lot of people could probably understand it well if they thought about the way that rsync works: Look at only the files that have changed, and only update those files which have changed. Subversion does this, however, they also deal with some other things that are useful, like that whole revision control thing.

As far as revision control goes, one of the benefits this will work with for me is that I can flip through the subversion logs and see my commit messages . I can look at my commit messages and see what I've changed, and fill out my time card slightly more accurately when I forget something.

So, all in all, I'm just amazed at the prospects for how much easier my life is going to get because of this. I think that it will increase my productivity a lot, improve accountability, and let my boss see what I'm working on (and others, as we move towards using the system more). Todd has already expressed an interest in using it - saying he's been meaning to do it for years, just hasn't got the time - and I think once he sees the benefits, he'll be kicking himself for missing it. I know that I am: I definitely shouldn't have gone nearly so long without RCS. When you're working by yourself on projects, though, it's very hard to realize the benefits that Subversion can offer. I'm going to be moving to a server seperate from my main machine in the near future, and I expect in the process, I'll move everything into subversion on one of the two servers: that will let me do the same thing with editing locally, and updating remotely.

All in all, Subversion seems like it's going to be a major boon to my development process. I'm really glad I took the time to install it.