Commit early, commit often!

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Commit early, commit often!

In General on 2010-05-14 by Jukka Zitting Tagged: development, scm

A huge commit was made in a log4j branch yesterday. The followup discussion:

“I haven’t had a chance to review the rest of the commit, but it seems like a substantial amount of work that was done in isolation. While things are still fresh, can you walk through the whats in this thing and the decisions that you made.”

Reply:

“I didn’t want to commit code until I had the core of something that actually functioned. I struggled for a couple of weeks over how to attack XMLConfiguration. […] See below for what I came up with.”

Followed by ten bullet points about the changes made. Unfortunately the only thing our version control system now knows about these changes is “First version”.

4 Comments

4 Responses to “Commit early, commit often!”

Sander Temme 2010-05-15 at 00:13

Good thing you can adjust revision logs after the fact in Subversion: just edit the svn:log property on the revision. Anyone with commit on the directory can do this.
Jukka Zitting 2010-05-17 at 09:10

Good idea, thanks!
Burning Chrome » Commit very early, commit very often! 2011-07-30 at 06:51

[…] probably heard it before: “Commit early, commit often“. It applies to teams, and it applies to […]
Bug 2011-12-17 at 06:55

Yeah, this kind of issue is endemic to centralized VCSs like Subversion. The only way to avoid it is to use branches for every such experimental feature (or just use a DVCS like Git and avoid the whole mess ;)