[Phpwm] Time management

[Lester Caine]

OK - my little rant about social network sites came about because I was 
reviewing just WHAT I do all day ;) And handling emails can be a big chunk. I've 
been at it an hour this morning already :(

For various reasons I am still using seamonkey, and have email history back to 
1997. Actually it may be earlier, but that is the earliest I've hit recently. 
When problems arise I can very quickly search through past messages and often 
find an answer within seconds. Something that on-line methods of working do not 
provide quite so easily. Hence my preference not to become embroiled with that 
method of working.

Another area that I have been wasting a lot of time on recently is 'version 
control', and while checking around a found a thread about that here back in '09 
asking about git usage but which seemed to peeter out. SO is it about time to 
reopen the discussion? What are people using nowadays?

I have been using Eclipse for many years and it's integrated CVS and later SVN 
clients just work and I still find them the best way of handling complex modular 
projects which need to work on both windows and linux. Often I have to check 
which machine I am on since Eclipse is so transparent.

The current time wasting comes in where projects have 'improved' by switching to 
git and personally I am finding that it is just a retrograde step since many of 
the good things about CVS/SVN are ignored in the drive to make 'building' code a 
lot easier. Since we do not 'build' php applications as such, git just seems to 
get in the way. The main problem is that git cross platform support is poor. Yes 
it can be used on windows but with a lot of problems. It is essentially a 
command line package, and integration into Eclipse is only partially complete, 
with the windows version simply not working the same as the Linux, and neither 
providing as transparent an interface as CVS.

Hg has proven to be a lot more 'windows friendly' and just as capable, with 
hggit providing direct access to github and actually works much better on 
windows that git's own third party tools. SO I have been running an Hg clone of 
all of the git bits I need access to, but still have to manage this outside 
Eclipse. I can't simply hit 'sync' and pull up a complete report of changes as I 
get currently with CVS/SVN in Eclipse.

I spent Thursday and Friday taking a step back so I could work out exactly where 
the problems were and check out the current state of play with all of the 
development platform. I even went back to the start and reinstalled eclipse, 
which is a doddle since there is now a nice bundled package for 'javascript' 
development which includes all I need for the web stuff. I am still using 
phpEclipse rather than switching to PDO, since I am just used to the way it 
works AND can hack the code when I need to. But it's at this point that things 
become considerably messy as there is not a 'single' path forward to add DVCS 
support ..

Anybody got any ideas for a way forward? My own thought today is to simply stop 
contributing back where a project has ignored the objections and simply ploughed 
ahead with git or hg. Progress should at least be productive, but I am not 
finding DVCS adds anything but obstructions :(

( And that is another 30 minutes wasted :) )

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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