[AccessD] version control

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Sat Apr 19 13:03:26 CDT 2008


Subversion is free and VSS is free too if you have already purchased Office
Developer or Visual Studio etc. If you have either of those, then you
already have VSS. If you're going the open-source route, then Google
Subversion and you'll get a download hit quickly enough.

Next thing is to decide where to place the version-control files. They are
going to take a lot of space, no doubt about that. As I mentioned, I have
since moved from thinking of these tools as source-code repositories to
document-repositories (meaning that I want each draft of my next article for
Red Gate and each instance of my various Access and Ruby apps) available at
all times from anywhere in civilization (e.g. internet).

The company for which I worked that opened my eyes to VSS is called
Accenture, and it's a big outfit. Thousands of employees all over the world.
Everything is stored in a VSS database in Chicago, if memory serves. The
physical location doesn't matter; only the access (to coin a phrase) does.

Suppose that you don't have all that available space, and you're a humble
SOHO with a couple of notebooks and a desktop or two and maybe a server.
Ensure that the server (or pretend-server, as economics dictate) has Lots of
space. That's square zero. Then start "recording" or "installing" all your
versions of product/document xyz123 into the VC (generic appelation for
Version Control) database. File everything -- Word docs, Access MDBs,
backups of your SQL dbs, PPT slideshows... everything.

We could spend days discussing which hierarchy you prefer, and I surrender
immediately: yours is correct. If it works for you, that's all that's
important. I am not here to profess some better way. Do what you will.
However, what you must do is declare a home base for said VC database, and
make copies of same frequently and take them offsite so you are covered even
in the event of a NewOrleans storm. You must do that. So...

You have one old tired box that has lots of storage and few brains. That's
your storage baby.  Everybody should point to him for the latest rev. of any
document or project. That's your main squeeze. That baby is best protected
very well, with RAID or offsite or whatever, but that baby is your baby.

Now we plug in remotely from some hotel in someplace and first thing we do
is install the latest version, not trusting our little memory stick to
actually contain the latest version. Every hour or so, while working in said
remote loc, we update the VC database.

This is not rocket science. It's quite trivial once you set up the system to
behave this way. You check something out, you work on it for a while, then
you check it back in. You made a few nightmarish changes that were
particularly ill-considered, you chuck them aside and request this morning's
version, before you got that brain-addled idea. It's simple.

Takes you about an hour to set up, and then you can be as addled as I, and
without risking major income problems.

This is not complicated. I think that I have outlined the basic steps. It
does depend upon a box with a large amount of available storage. That is for
certain. Right-click My Documents then select Properties and see what's
there. In my case I do not store apps under My Documents, so I have an
additional directory or three to deal with, but it's not that complicated.
Shove it all into the VC system of your choice and that's that. And then,
anytime you want to undo yesterday's mistakes, it's easy!

On Sat, Apr 19, 2008 at 12:16 PM, William Hindman <
wdhindman at dejpolsystems.com> wrote:

> ...me too!
>
> William
>



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