A short aside

[chebe]

Half the screen on my laptop is broken, and at six years of age the insurance has expired. This means a momentous event is about to occur, the New Laptop. And I'm getting all excited. It's coming with Windows 7 (which I haven't tried yet), so I think I'm going to have to dual-boot it with linux. Probably Fedora, but I'll have to try a Live CD first to see if the USB problems I went through are hardware/driver specific. I have an existing Windows XP VM I'll probably set up under linux too. And I'm thinking of setting up a lamp stack on CentOS to play around with WordPress. Which means I might have use of the IE-testing VMs Microsoft made up. Also a full Eclipse set-up for Android development might be fun. Then there's also the software/IDEs for my music player and xBees that are Windows-only. Can I set-up my VMs in a third partition and have them happily accessed from either OS? That'd be neat. And a media partition too, which I could set up with rsync to external backup. Am I going to need software version control, if for nothing else then Arduino code? If so, which one? ... Maybe this is all just overkill. Then again, I am a computer geek ;) Oh the things I'm going to learn!

Comments

[floatboth]

Mercurial is less popular, slower, but a little easier (commands are more specific, eg. git checkout == hg branch & update & revert). Read this: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/01/the-real-difference-between-mercurial-and-git/

And use git. Just because of GitHub. Or use Mercurial with GitHub. http://hg-git.github.com/

Also, IE VMs? http://browserling.com

[chebe]

Woah, hey, your solutions have the disadvantage of requiring money for decent usage. I prefer the free solutions, seeing as I won't be making money on any of this. If I set up version control it will be with my own local server. Similarly with browser testing, the IE VMs are free: http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/04/internet-explorer-for-mac-ie7-ie8-ie-9-free/

[floatboth]

Decent usage == private repos?

If you want to keep it on your machine, you don't need any server at all. You can push to BitBucket (unlimited private repos!) instead of GitHub for backing up, but GitHub is really great for open source projects.

And you can use Browserling for free, 5 minutes per session.

[chebe]

Browserling, 5 minutes per sessions (not nearly enough for testing in all browsers), while demand isn't high, for free, for now. That's not decent usage.

I'm not keen on letting third parties host my private code at all. Why would I do that? Disaster recover isn't a major concern. The only benefit would be on multi-person projects, which I'm not.

I'm sure they are good solutions for people who need them, I just don't understand this handing over everything to entities you don't know and can't trust.

[floatboth]

So you're working on something that's not open source and not for profit… just curious what it is :-)

[chebe]

It's just random bits and pieces, like tester programs on various devices, maybe some scripts, toys really. That if they ever come together properly and seem like they might be useful to other people might find themselves becoming little open-source projects. The need for version control comes from working on them from different physical and virtual machines. At the moment I have to search through several external hard-drives trying to find the newest version of the right file, it's a pain.