Yesterday I logged onto Sourceforge account and created a project for PopTrayU, so I’d have somewhere to release my modified PopTray. Yes, I could probably do it all from scratch on my own site, but why bother when they have all the tools right there, it’s a respected site for looking for free software, and it’s also where PopTray’s verison history is hosted as well.
For some reason I had presumed that Sourceforge only provided hosting for files and I’d have to zip up complete versions of source code to save on Sourceforge (probably because that’s what PopTray did), but lo and behold, it has options to set up SVN or Mercurial. I wish I’d known about this sooner!
I’d previously looked into setting up SVN on my website for this purpose, but although creating the repository worked flawlessly without installing any additional tools, figuring out the username/password issues and proper URL repository path on the shared hosting environment was not successful. So I had been doing daily zip file backups every time I work on the project up until now with the hope that I would eventually get real version control set up where you can browse all the incremental changes to each file to track where a change was introduced, etc.
Now I am chugging away at setting up the repository structure, and going back to the original source code, checking that in, and checking in incremental bits of the changes in managable chunks. It may or may not compile on any of the intermediate versions because I’m mass importing changes via diff’s, but it’s a small price to pay, I’ll probably add a tag when I get to the point where I have something checked in that builds and compiles. Mostly I’m checking in incrementally so I can better document what changes I’ve made and isolate related changes in case any of them later need reverting or debugging…slightly more useful than here’s every change that’s in version 4.0
It just feels really good to get everything checked in, so I have a good, easy, up to date, not on my computer backup of everything, so there’s less risk of having to start over if my hard drive explodes.