On: Dwarf Fortress' creator on how he's 42% towards si...

[simoncion]

> If you are a solo developer, version control is literally a waste of time.

Strong disagree. If you're working on things that are sufficiently complex, you'll not-infrequently find yourself in a situation where the thing you were working on has become broken, and you can't remember how or when it broke.

Single-dev version control lets you make frequent checkpoints so that you can compare the current state to a previous one to discover the source of and quickly recover from failures of the mind such as these.

My git history is littered with one or three word commit messages. If I ever go to publish my code (or finish with what I was doing) then I rebase all that shit into a coherent history. But, until that point I don't spend even a microsecond worrying about attaching meaningful messages to my checkpoint commits.

[XorNot → simoncion]

Eh...I find git is actually really bad for this type of thing. It's too in the way. Git is great for "I'm throwing all this out, but want to remember what I did or some of the neat things in it".

But to fix an accident? That's what ~5-min ZFS snapshots are for.

[simoncion → XorNot]

How are ~5 minute ZFS snapshots significantly better than

  git log --patch

to look at your history, combined with

  git checkout $COMMIT

to get the code to perform any tests required? (Or, if you have a reliable automated test,

  git bisect start HEAD $KNOWN_GOOD_COMMIT -- && git bisect run $TEST

will automatically find the error for you.) [0][1]

And remember that the git checkpoint creation process is -at its most verbose- running

  git commit -m "C"

[0] You can use points-in-time as commit references, like 'master@{30 minutes ago}' or 'HEAD@{2016-01-01}'

[1] And even if you don't have a test, you can easily manually run the bisect machinery.

[shabble → XorNot]

That sounds like a pretty nifty feature - can you point at any docs about how that works/how to set it up?

At university the lab systems had a networked home directory setup, and one of the greatest things was a '/yesterday/' link to your personal homedir, exactly as it was 1 day ago.

I have no idea how they set it up, but something along these lines is plausible.