Newbie questions about managing code

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Dec 20 14:16:39 UTC 2001


On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 08:38:56PM -0800, Chris Muller wrote:
> 
> I am a fascinated Squeak-newbie bursting with questions.  I have lots of
> Smalltalk experience, but in other dialects (VA & VW).  I'm finally ready
> for Squeak, but am still trying to get familiarized with my new environment.
> I have a couple of questions.
> 
> - What are some best-practices for maintaining my code in a safe-as-ENVY
> way.  If I'm writing new code every day that I do not want to lose, is it
> reliable enough to simply back up my changes file every day?  Or do I need
> to file-out all of my ChangeSets for a more reliable recovery should the
> need arise.

Welcome!

There is now a good FAQ page on the swiki, and it provides some information
on these questions. The swiki is at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak, and
the FAQ page is http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/471.

I started Squeak as a newbie (very little of Smalltalk experience and
none with Squeak) and was initially quite alarmed by the possibility of
losing everything in a crash. I was also quite adept at stumbling into
various ways of crashing the system through ignorance.  Here is what I
now do to keep things backed up (on a Linux system in this case):

1) Daily backups of my system, including whatever image and changes file
I've been working on. Just do whatever you normally do for backups, and
make sure you know how to find yesterday's image and changes file from
your backup. In case of a thoroughly trashed image, you can recover
using yesterday's image and changes (which you should think of as a
matched set), to which you can manually reapply all the subsequent
changes which will still be in the changes file for your currently
trashed image.

2) I keep a subdirectory in my Squeak home directory called "save", and
every once in a while I copy (and compress) my current image and changes
files into the "save" directory. This gives an extra measure of protection
in case the normal backup were to fail for some reason. And if I am
expecting to do any particularly risky work that is likely to hang the
system, I save the image and changes to this directory first, so that I
can quickly get back to a known good state.

I have trashed my Squeak image a number of times, but I have not lost
any work.

HTH,
Dave





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