Comments on: Your version control system is not a file system

By: Claudio Bezerra

Claudio Bezerra — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 11:31:52 +0000

Hi, first I’d like to praise a good iniative. I’ve not seen much material on the web about software building seen from a perspective of software engineering.
I saw that one visitor, Fabrizio Dutra, mentioned that versioning derivative files is a bad practice and I agree. However not everyone at my office agrees. Do you know of books or articles that confirm this assumption?
Thanks in advance!

By: simpsonjulian

simpsonjulian — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:43:12 +0000

Dear Visitor,

I love comment and debate on my blog. If you’d only make a comment that wasn’t abusive, we’d talk about it and I’d probably update the post.

Can I suggest that if you’re going to make abusive comments, you don’t do it from [presumably] your employer’s netblock?

By: a visitor

a visitor — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:40:42 +0000

You’re an idiot. Do you know how many kinds of binary files exist in organisations that need to be worked upon by a team, with all the changes tracked over time? What about creatives with images like PSD’s? How do you propose tracking changes to these files? Create a new folder on the filesystem for each changed version? Oh no, wait – that’s exactly what you’re saying is a bad idea. Or how about just don’t maintain old versions… no whoops that won’t work either because then there’s no versioning at all. Or how about… you have a version control system that just uses the binary deltas to track changes in binary files? Wow, guess you never thought of that before writing an article and bothering to publish it.

douchebag

By: techblog » Blog Archive » Notes from QCon London 2009 - Day 1

techblog » Blog Archive » Notes from QCon London 2009 - Day 1 — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:54:01 +0000

[...] maintenance is carried out. Deployable builds should be labelled, but big binary files like this should not be kept in version control. An ivy repository is an [...]

By: Fabrizio Dutra

Fabrizio Dutra — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:57:38 +0000

Excell and Word files are note derivate files and must be consider as source files and it is normal.
The problem is versioning derivate files… (this can be also a JSP files in some systems)
Versioning derivate files is a bad practice can leave your versions not-repeatable and with difficult to maintain.

By: Douglas Squirrel

Douglas Squirrel — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Hear hear! See my response post
for a cautionary tale of woe caused by big binary files. But what are you supposed to do with Excel or Word files, which don't have a plain-text form but still may need versioning?