PureBasic Forums - English

If you do consider adding a VCS, it does not get any easier than Fossil(open source). A Fossil repository is a single SQLite db file. You can copy them anywhere you like and they become another remote backup. You can browse and control your repo with a single web cmd: "Fossil ui myrepo". Git and the others require 3rd party mechanisms.

skywalk wrote:If you do consider adding a VCS, it does not get any easier than Fossil(open source).

Implementing only support for Fossil would be very limiting, because - according to my very own view of the world -
everybody seems to be using Git-based solutions nowadays. Something like GitHub and BitBucket basically, sometimes
combined with Jira or Upsource.
It's basically about new, cloud-based, solutions - and many people are still afraid of those new things.

I think such projects may be the future, and can help you with project management, issues/bugs tracking, planning, etc.,
but at the same time I feel the same resistance to it so many (older) developers have.
I'm trying to see it as an investment (because it may cost a few bucks a month), so it is worth it. It could help me to
become more productive. At the same time, everything cloud-based means to put your stuff into other's hands,
and that's what the resistance is all about. Giving up full control.
And, cloud-based still does not mean safe and secure - you still have to make additional backups, for example.

At the moment, it seems, many people still reject those cloud-based solutions. Using Adobe products isn't cool anymore.
Instead Adobe's cloud-based solutions (like Photoshop) we use Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer today.
No subscriptions. Just 49,99 €., and free updates And, we don't give up control completely.
I think that's what it is about, basically - although the NSA is still working on the problem to spy and control everything,
even if it's not in the cloud.

This is Fossil.exe serving up the SQLite repo
There are some customizations to allow a mailing list and download mechanisms, but they are still open source and could be duplicated if you have a server environment. The wiki and timeline and reporting is built-in cgi stuff.

The Cloud is what you make of it. Seed it too heavily and it thunders and rains all over the place. I prefer a bit more controlled chaos and a limited number of passionate users checking in and out.

<Bump!>

I searched for discussions on this topic as I just started doing this and was interested to know what the PB community do. I'm not a professional developer I'm a systems engineer/manager who codes as a hobby but in these days of devops it pays to understand the world of CICD better. In the past I've looked into Git and subversion but since I code by myself and don't really need anything shared online it just seemed like a hassle so I never really got into it.

Anyway, I did an online training course last month on udemy about "Git, BitBucket & Sourcetree" (only ever pay for these during their 90% off sales which are common or you'll get ripped off, and even then only if you can't find good stuff on youTube!) since developers at work use Git and BitBucket and decided I'd revive an old project since I haven't done much hobby coding for a few years and do the whole version control thing to learn it.

Actually I was pleasantly surprised, I should have done this a while ago! Git is a simple install and you need a bitbucket account (free) to enable Sourcetree (which is basically a locally installed version of bitbucket as far as I can tell) so I use Sourcetree as my simple UI for Git. I don't have anything online shared but I could, and I can clone other peoples repositories easily with this to my PC and even collaborate and push back. I'm not using the online GitHub repository

Basically I'm just using the basics though. I have a master branch and a dev branch, I stage files, commit changes regularly with a comment and merge back to master when I have a stable copy which is tested and then it is tagged for a version. It has auto code diff features so I can see what changed or I can read the commit history. I don't use the commandline interface for Git since sourcetree does all that but I could from doing the course.

I guess any pro developers reading this will think "duh, so what?" but previously I had a folder per project and per major version and I'd incrementally save a file in a version "MyProject_v2.1.1.pb" but in the project I'm picking up again now there are 8 major versions in folders going back to 2009 and attempting to understand the details of version history is a nightmare, each had different algorithms being tried out.

I still don't know how I'll scope repo's in future, perhaps have one per major project and then one for lots of scripts or something but I'll look at what pro's do in the office more now.

I was thinking of changing IDE's too to something that had integration features but the PB IDE has it's debugger so even though I looked at Atom and Microsoft VS Code with their sexy interfaces I came back to the PB IDE. (although I like the full code view with unreadably small text for scrolling around)

Anyway, Like the original author of this thread I though I'd ask and share. I'm definitely a convert to Sourcetree and Git and if you have ever wanted better version control but just didn't want the hassle of tools, extra stuff to thing about and change etc then I'd suggest looking at it again as it's come a long way and isn't an interference with working in the PB IDE

Yes, git has become the monopoly of distributed version control(DVCS).
But, do not discount the compactness and simplicity of Fossil. It will never going away as long as SQLite is a thing.
For repo's under 2GB, it is the cat's meow. If you are writing code for the next space shuttle or Martian lander, stick with git and the million LOC.
For all else, you can serve up multiple "myrepo.fossil, myrepo2.fossil" 's from one interface using a single fossil.exe. As well as view timelines and edit doc's and repo access from that same fossil.exe.

For personal use => History Viewer

It integrates into the PB IDE and you can just completely forgot about it, it will just do the job in the background.

As soon as you need to look into your changes, just open it.
You can also use it to synchronize between different PCs (with an online postgresql database then).

I didn't touch the code for quite a while, let's hope you don't come-up with any improvement suggestions