Re:I quit my job to work full time on my open source project
by globular-toast on Thursday January 11, 2024 @05:14AM
(#38950203)
Good tools change the way you work. Imagine if version control systems were notoriously unreliable and difficult to get working. You'd be saying "nobody needs their entire commit history, if you need a version create a source archive and back it up".
But version control systems do work, so we use them, we keep history and we tag releases and don't really need to bother with source archives any more.
Nobody is saying history is a substitution for documentation or an audit trail or anything else, but it is a useful tool if it works. Consider a case where you're exploring a new dataset you find online. You download it into a directory, run some commands to transform it, load it into a database etc. You don't know if this will ever be useful. But if it does turn out to be useful, you now have a log of everything you did to get there. Trying to document everything up front would be insane and you'd never get any exploratory work done.
But version control systems do work, so we use them, we keep history and we tag releases and don't really need to bother with source archives any more.
Nobody is saying history is a substitution for documentation or an audit trail or anything else, but it is a useful tool if it works. Consider a case where you're exploring a new dataset you find online. You download it into a directory, run some commands to transform it, load it into a database etc. You don't know if this will ever be useful. But if it does turn out to be useful, you now have a log of everything you did to get there. Trying to document everything up front would be insane and you'd never get any exploratory work done.