Commit very early, commit very often!

You’ve probably heard it before: “Commit early, commit often“. It applies to teams, and it applies to individuals.

I agree with that advice. I started my “unstable” branch on the Verbosio XML editor project a few months ago so I could commit freely without breaking the hg trunk of my project. I’m glad I did – I now commit (and push) my changes on this branch two or three times a week without much regard to whether it works or not. It’s very useful when working from multiple computers.

A few moments ago, I wished I had been even more aggressive about freestyle committing. I committed one change out of three that I need – another took me some four days to hash out, and the third I hadn’t started on yet. So I executed a “clean” command on my build script – the one that does symbolic links – and lost all the files in the source for that symbolic link. Four days of work, gone due to a bug in my build script and overconfidence in my set-up.

*sigh* At least I can take comfort that I’m not the only one to make that kind of dumb mistake.

Sometimes, even “Commit early, commit often” won’t save you. So commit very early, commit very often, and if you don’t think you can — create a private branch, and commit anyway!

My former boss at Skyfire once told me branches are cheap. Disk drive space is, too.