Smash the state
Jul. 24th, 2006 02:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roadrunnertwiceSo now that I've gotten sort of used to having Subversion be a part of my writing process, what do I think of it? It's nice. Like: I just deleted a whole directory of obsolete stuff.* Poof! Gone. Don't have to think about it or work around it anymore. But if I made a mistake, or if I ever need them again for some murky reason or another, I can bring any of them back from the dead with a word, at any later date. Likewise with making huge sweeping changes to the currently in-progress chapter file; I'm actually still trying to get used to the idea that I'm allowed to be fearless now.
How about the process of business-as-usual as mediated through Subversion? Not too bad. I tend to think of doing an
So yeah, using it is feasible enough for a barely-technical type like myself, and I'd say I'm already starting to see significant benefits from it, but they're mostly of the peace-of-mind variety. Version control is one of those things that only pays off in a concrete way once you're in the later stages of a project and manage to royally fuck something up.
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* Once I started using VoodooPad in earnest, I imported a whole crapload of text files into it, dumping the husks into a separate folder when I was finished with 'em. Those were what I just blitzed.
** These are actually directories, but MacOS treats them as a single file. You can peek into 'em by right-clicking and choosing "show package contents." You don't usually need to, though, because the contents are managed entirely by the program that made 'em.
How about the process of business-as-usual as mediated through Subversion? Not too bad. I tend to think of doing an
svn commit as a sort of "Super Save Button." There are a few gotchas: you have to explicitly add any new files with an svn add command, which will snag you if you work with any "bundle**" file formats like VoodooPad uses. svn add --force takes care of that case quite nicely, though, assuming that individual files in the bundle are being tracked by something like a UUID rather than an English-language label. And while you can move and rename files, you don't get to use the Finder or any other standard tool to do it; you have to go into the terminal and do an svn mv for each of 'em. That's kind of bogus, and if I end up deciding to do that "SVN For The People" project I was thinking about, outsmarting that behavior will be a significant part of the job. In the meantime, though, it's hardly crippling—it tripped me up bigtime once, but then I learned my lesson and started doing things its way.So yeah, using it is feasible enough for a barely-technical type like myself, and I'd say I'm already starting to see significant benefits from it, but they're mostly of the peace-of-mind variety. Version control is one of those things that only pays off in a concrete way once you're in the later stages of a project and manage to royally fuck something up.
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* Once I started using VoodooPad in earnest, I imported a whole crapload of text files into it, dumping the husks into a separate folder when I was finished with 'em. Those were what I just blitzed.
** These are actually directories, but MacOS treats them as a single file. You can peek into 'em by right-clicking and choosing "show package contents." You don't usually need to, though, because the contents are managed entirely by the program that made 'em.