[Seaside] Image savers versus file-out savers

[goran at krampe.se]

Hi!

Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As far as version control is concerned, are you all mostly using Monticello?

That would be my guess. For bug fixes for the official Squeak most
people still use ChangeSets (and that is recommended) but for main
development Monticello is most probably used by 90%. Just a guess of
course.

Also note that from 3.9 Monticello is used at the core of maintaining
the Squeak official image. So it is definitely the "standard" source
code management tool in Squeak today.

> Do any of you back up your image an a VCS system like subversion?

Nope (not me at least), stuffing images in a VCS seems less fruitful.
You would only get "versioning" and none of all the other functions a
VCS offers since it will just be a "binary blob".

What I *do* do is to once in a while save an image to have an easy way
of getting back to a checkpoint. Like before an extensive experiment -
or just after I have prepared my dev image with all 3-rd party extras
etc. And if I would work in a larger team then of course I could stuff
one or two of these into a VCS but that would just be because it would
make it easy for other team members to find them.

> Alternately, do any of you file out your code and back it up in VCS?

That would be more useful - and Monticello started as "DVS" which
actually used CVS as backend (or any other VCS).
Sidenote: I also hacked up a CVS pserver protocol implementation a few
years back (for fun) - it is almost complete.

My personal preference when it comes to VCS tools "for files" is Darcs.
And I have indeed been toying with the idea of using darcs together with
Squeak BUT... that is again mostly for fun. AFAIK Monticello2 will offer
most (or perhaps even more?) of the advantages of Darcs (primarily
"cherry picking").

Unless you have a very specific reason to do it - I do not see any
compelling point of using an external VCS if you already use Monticello.
One such reason could of course be "company or dev team policy" if you
are working in a larger context. But it really is "pancake on pancake"
as we say in Swedish. :)

Btw, note that an mcz file is a zip file with readable code files in it.

regards. Göran