Only a couple of years ago a source code management system, as far as I was concerned, was somewhere you checked files out of when you started development for a release, and checked them back in a month or two later. Integration was something that generally occupied the next few weeks, as everybody’s changes fought amongst themselves over who could find the most interesting ways to break stuff.
Yesterday we had a major power fault in the server room where our Subversion and CruiseControl boxes (amongst a lot of much more important stuff) lives.
It’s surprising how much of a pain it now seems not to be able to commit code as I get it working. Not to be able to integrate other people’s changes. Not to be able to check that my code passes all the acceptance tests in a controlled environment.
At least it’s not like the old days when we had to actually do all our development on the Unix server, so I can still get on with things until it’s all sorted out.
Aha! It seems that while I was typing this post, the repository has come back online.
[tags]continuous integration[/tags]