Natalie Tootie

For the past, well I don’t know how long, like two or three weeks, every day I’ve been faced with very real and very difficult challenges. I overcome them, and am happy about it, but the beginning of each challenge is usually filled with uncertainty and doubt. And my ideas don’t always work out.

Like the time I made an entire website with Drupal only to realize that Wordpress was going to be the better option. I’m still cleaning that mess up as Google had indexed half the pages already. Learning how to redirect moved pages in a way Google likes is another lesson I learned.

Today’s problem is source code management, or version control software, if you prefer. At Microsoft, I used something called source depot, of all the things at Microsoft, source depot was awesome. It does things exactly right. Now it is rumored heavily that source depot is based on a product called Perforce that’s used by a lot of big companies. And Perforce will work for me, but it’s limited. Free use is limited to 2 users and 5 “workspaces” which I assume is the equivalent to an enlistment, which is one (of potentially many) views of the code on a single machine which you can work on.

The problem is, after this, it gets hugely expensive. $900 per user per year for the first year, then $160 a year after that. And the other problem is given its proprietary nature I doubt the open source community loves it (although it is free for open source use.)

That basically brings me to Subversion, which is fine. My web host even supports it so I can use them as a server and repository. But I can just feel that quality difference from source depot and it makes me nervous.

So I am reading the docs, and just wanting to get started so bad, but have to take the time to learn yet another new thing. I like all this learning in so many ways, but I just can’t wait to have all the basics covered. I mean, I don’t want version control for the sake of version control. There’s actually an important real world thing that needs to come from this, and that’s going to take its own time. And to be able to do that work, I need complex features like branching. So the faster I can get through this, the better.

But my brain was full, so I decided to blog about it.