Subversion Pays Off

For ages now I’ve been keeping the EditLive! installer for my demo environment in subversion. Having the ability to roll back quickly and easily if something goes wrong has given me the confidence to track the development branch reasonably closely and then be able to show people the features that have just finished being developed which is fantastic market feedback. I’ve never actually had to rollback before, but today I found an alternative use: reproducing bugs.

It turns out a certain combination of plugins with specific signing certificates causes too many security dialogs to pop up and the dev team is having trouble reproducing it. Since I happened to hit that configuration in my demo environment, but had since resigned the plugins to get around it, I could just give the right revision number and they get an exact test case.

What I find particularly nice, is that there’s no overhead in using subversion because I’ve just included it in the update scripts I use to download the early access build and install it. I can carry on with what I’m doing and leave the planning for a rainy day to my scripts. That’s how computing should be…