One for the nerds....

[tyggerjai]

So I now have 2 or 3 machines I use for tinkering with the little projects I have, and I'd like to keep the code synched. There are many tools for this, of course, and I'm not wanting to start a religious war about which tool I should use, but rather seeking advice on how to use them best :)

Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have access to git and/or subversion. Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have a ~/Code directory, which has, of course, a Python directory and a Perl directory, which then contain project directories and library directories.

Assuming for the moment that I don't care so much about synching "broken" code - in that I want to be able to half-finish something on the desktop, commit it to the repo, and check it out on the laptop to keep tinkering - as much as I care about the latest version, is my best strategy to commit ~/Code en masse and then just update en masse?

Or should I commit each project individually to the repo, so I can branch later if need be?

Comments

[thorfinn]

Yep. :-) Different goals, different solutions.

You want to keep directories in sync across different machines, put them inside Dropbox. There are other solutions, but I guarantee you Dropbox is the simplest, quickest, and least prone to error, by a very very long way. Just the dev directories, if you like, since presumably the stable branches shouldn't contain anything except correct stable versions.

[tyggerjai]

And then I can also configure the netbook to just get the code stuff from dropbox, since it can't handle the full 2 gig. Yeah, that works. Need to explore the advanced dropbox fu a bit more. Do you know if I can go back and tweak it easily after choosing "basic" install option?

[tyggerjai]

Oh look, that would be "select which directories sync to this computer"...

[thorfinn]

I'm not aware of multiple versions of Dropbox installs, but I'm only using it on iOS, Mac OS and Windoze. With the latter two you just pop open the Dropbox Preferences from the Menu/Tray Icon then clicky Advanced to find the Selective Sync option... iOS you have to explicitly favourite individual things if you want them to be downloaded for offline.

[ideological_cuddle]

The other thing to know is that if you symlink something into the Dropbox tree, Dropbox will happily sync it properly. I'm using this feature to keep my music where iTunes wants it, but with a symlink from ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music (or whatever) to ~/Dropbox/Music.

Dropbox treats that symlink as though it were a real directory so far as the other client machines go, so anywhere I don't explicitly exclude ~/Dropbox/Music from sync, it'll just pull all the music across as a directory rather than as a symlink.

This may be useful if for some reason you really want stuff in random directories in different places but still want Dropbox to sync it all.