[DivideByZero]

Over the last few weeks at work, I have noticed how vital source control is.

This got me thinking, there were times last year where I would forget my USB with all my code and couldn't work on any uni projects because of that.
This year is my final year and I know the assignments I'll be getting will be even bigger and more important than the last.

So this leads to my question, what source control software would you recommend to a student? And why?

Hopefully the advice here encourages other students to use source control so that they don't lose any work next year (trust me, if you lose your usb near the end of your deadline, goodbye degree).

Thanks in advance

This post has been edited by DivideByZero: 10 July 2011 - 11:37 AM

[rgfirefly24]

SVN, it is free and does everything you'll want for student assignments

[Ghlavac]

It depends what kind of language you are doing, some of them have better IDE integrations for different source control systems.

[DivideByZero]

Ghlavac, on 10 July 2011 - 08:13 PM, said:

It depends what kind of language you are doing, some of them have better IDE integrations for different source control systems.

For me I'll be using Visual Studio all of next year.

[rgfirefly24]

git has a nice Visual studio integration which you can get through package manager. Also I believe that SVN has a natural integration to Visual Studio through the source control options of Visual Studio

[ja2o]

..................

sorry

[jon.kiparsky]

I like subversion, myself, but apparently this puts me way behind the times.
That's fine with me, but the cool kids seem to like git and mercurial. Whichever you use, try to make some time to learn any cool features. For example, the hooks in subversion can be made to do some cool tricks, like automating build, deployment, and documentation. I'm sure there are similar features in git and mercurial.

Also, if you get into subversion, you should learn to use the command-line interface. It's a native unix tool, so you'll always have the most flexibility and power when you talk to it directly from the keyboard, even in a Windows environment.

What always strikes me as weird is that universities don't use source control repositories as a homework submission mechanism. If I were a professor, I'd really like to be able to review a student's progress in solving a particular problem, and it would certainly be handy when students complain that the homework was too hard. ("Well, Jimmy, it seems you didn't check anything in until last night, maybe you should have started on it sooner...")
As a side benefit, it would get the students used to using source control.

[hookiethe1]

Why, in the name of all that is good and logical, would you keep the only copy of anything important on a USB flashdrive????

[W3bDev]

hookiethe1, on 12 July 2011 - 11:41 AM, said:

Why, in the name of all that is good and logical, would you keep the only copy of anything important on a USB flashdrive????

Agreed.

I use SVN, with TortoiseSVN for explorer integration, and AnkhSVN for Visual Studio integration.

[MATTtheSEAHAWK]

Well I know this really isn't source control, but I really love to use dropbox. I don't really make a lot of big projects besides one I've started on recently and it's not going to be open-source. I'm really noob-ish with source control, I want to get into git but does everything you put on it have to be open-source? That's one of the reasons I use dropbox. I have it installed on both my machines and I know it's pretty secure.

[cfoley]

Quote

What always strikes me as weird is that universities don't use source control repositories as a homework submission mechanism. If I were a professor, I'd really like to be able to review a student's progress in solving a particular problem, and it would certainly be handy when students complain that the homework was too hard. ("Well, Jimmy, it seems you didn't check anything in until last night, maybe you should have started on it sooner...")
As a side benefit, it would get the students used to using source control.

I know one lecturer who did that for a group work assignment to make the students learn CVS. Most of the projects had a single large commit at the end of the project.

[jon.kiparsky]

You can use these with any sort of project - the stuff in the svn repository at my work is certainly not open-source! There are a number of folks who offer free repo space to open-source projects, as a sort of incentive to produce open-source software and in some cases as a piece of advertising for a service they then sell to proprietary projects, but you can set up a repository of your own or pay for space on someone else's.

One thing that you should do immediately is to set up a local repository on your home machine. This won't protect you against loss of data if the machine dies, but it will provide the incremental backup that allows you to roll back to previous levels. This is dead simple with command-line SVN, especially in a sane (ie, posix-compliant) environment.

From there, you might consider experimenting with combinations of ant and svn, to see what kind of trouble you can get into. For example, see if you can make an ant targets for deploy and javadoc that include svn rev number, which can be useful information in debugging, if you have copies in the world.

[e_i_pi]

I've used both SVN (with TortoiseSVN) and TFS. SVN is far superior in my opinion, as it's much easier to see what changes need to be merged. Aside from that, I have a soft spot for SVN, like the way TortoiseSVN integrates with Windows, and have to use it at work hehe

[Curtis Rutland]

I'd say git and github. None of your homework needs to be super-secret. Spin up a github repo for each assignment, or one big repo with subfolders for each. That way, even if you forget to bring your files with you on your USB key, they're still available online.

Seriously, I love github for what it does.