Workspace over Dropbox, Eclipse, spotting changes

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hello Dears,

so we actually use Dropbox instead of SVN for some months now.

The problem is, without “proper” version control, and without asking people, or having people leave notes, it may be hard to stop whats new / what has changed

However, couldn’t there be an option for this in eclipse ?

We never work actively on Dropbox of course, its just to down or upload new stuff.
So I have an old copy of the project an code in my workspace, now I would like to kinda “remember this code”, THEN update, and then tell me whats different.

IF its not possible in eclipse, whats are the best simple tools for this, that you know of ?

#2

GIT is a good choice, if you must use Dropbox then its possible to use GIT on top of Dropbox (just Google for instructions), better yet just use a proper service like Github, BitBucket, etc instead of Dropbox.

#3

Apart from the fact sad fact, that we tried GIT and were utterly confused how to get it to work, we have artists, and those really cannot be bothered with that kinda stuff.
Now its pretty simple with Dropbox, when everybody can just copy over their work.

#4

I’ve found Mercurial to be a little more accessible from the get-go than git. The basic commands are named the same as svn, except you just need to remember to push after a commit, and update after a pull – and if you enable the fetch extension, you don’t even need that second part.

I appreciate the complexities of software, and version control can be indeed hairy once you get into complex branching and merging, but anyone who won’t make an attempt at the equivalent commands to cvs/svn is entirely too lazy to help.

#5

Yeah, what you do is use GIT inside Dropbox. That way the repository will be available from wherever you have a DropBox account associated with it. DropBox just acts like a server. Moreover, Eclipse has a super-easy git plugin that takes like 2 or 3 clicks to commit changes and write a log.

#6

Git and hg can be used with dropbox in a pinch for single developer projects. Dropbox’s very simple conflict resolution mechanism is going to destroy your repo the moment multiple developers submit simultaneous changes (where “simultaneous” could be measured in hours). Even non-conflicting changes would do it. And that corruption will propagate to all your replicated copies, defeating the purpose of a DVCS.

What dropbox actually is nifty for is sharing exported changesets – a sort of poor-man’s pull request mechanism. A bit more convenient than email anyway.

Seriously, if this is a professional project or just one that’s being run even slightly professionally, manage it: impose a real VCS on the developers and demand they learn it.

#7

Agree with sprongie on all points. In addition I would like to advocate for Mercurial and BitBucket. Although Git gets all of the love and attention, Mercurial is a great DVCS and (for me) easier to learn than Git. Joel Spoloski has a great tutorial.

#8

If for some esoteric reason you cannot user version control, then get in the habit of firing a Comparison program (Like Meld or BeyondCompare, google for options) to see if anything has changed.

Maybe even could be scripted to launch under certain conditions (Say, have your dropbox shortcut actually fire the script, or a task that fires after a certain time).

I used to do this when using a usb drive to move data from my home environment to my office environment, but eventually got fed up with it and switched to using SVN.

#9

DropBox has its own versioning sort of system if you have a team account, i think its packrat, but it won’t be as useful as git

#10

I use dropbox for general stuff like images… github I found had a little bit of a learning curve, so I just stuck with svn. xp-dev.com lets you set up svn pretty easy and tracking changes isn’t too bad either.

-Pickle :slight_smile:

#11

I recommend using the MercurialEclipse plugin for Eclipse. It’s excellent, and the latest snapshots are very stable as far as I see them.

You must have Mercurial installed first, then you go into Eclipse’s Help Menu -> Install New Software -> Add this link: http://mercurialeclipse.eclipselabs.org.codespot.com/hg.wiki/update_site/snapshots -> Check the non-experimental one -> Keep hitting next/accept until you install :slight_smile: