On Sun, 09 Dec 2007 08:05:48 -0000, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...961...> wrote:
To underscore the utility of this - at UDS, Ted and Kees had an Inkscape hacking session, where Kees majorly redid the Print Dialog. He got it to a point where it worked okay, but there were still some issues. The hotel wireless was busted so he couldn't commit it (he wasn't even sure it was ready for general consumption due to remaining issues). He pressed on and unfortunately got the code into a non-functioning state, and couldn't figure out how to get it back to where it was, since all the work was done outside revision control. So even today we remain Print Dialog-less because of this. With git or bzr (or hg), this would have not been an issue; he could have just committed locally as he went, and rolled back as soon as he found himself in a dead end situation.
Every programmer (or hopeful novelist) should be running the following on a 5 mintue contab:
find <list of directories to be protected> -not -name "*~" -not -name "#*" -type f -mmin -5 -exec cp --backup=t --parents "{}" <location of backup directory>
This ensures that I can always go back in 5 minute intervals so long as I remember to just Ctl-S the files I'm working on. It has saved my bacon many times. The "-not" options are for Emacs users who don't want to keep the working files in their backup directory. I also have another cronjob that cleans out these "quickie" backups once they're more than 14 days old, as well as a more normal nightly backup.
The above can be adapted to Macs too. Windows, not so much AFAIK.
Thomas