I am jumping off a laptop as my primary development machine and moving to an iMac. I plan to maintain an older laptop for development use on business trips and other working travels, as well as occasional coffee shop visits.
Would love to hear any protips out there for maintaing two dev environments while minimizing the necessary fiddling. Details would be great! I generally work with Ruby, Rails, MySQL, git, and numerous Ruby gems.
Thanks in advance for all ideas you can share!
I've found that using something like MacPorts can the ease the pain of maintaining n different systems. And not only maintaining them, but keeping the environments fairly close (same versions of same packages).
It sounds like you want to make sure the code in the 2 environments is in synch. Create a sandbox from your version control system and keep everything in the VCS. If you can't guarantee access to your VCS server, keep the latest on a USB stick and carry it with you.
And if you can't guarantee access to your VCS, then you can do something like host a "local" VCS on your iMac that you can then commit to from your laptop.
A distribute VCS like Git is perfect for this, even if you use a different VCS for you main code on the Mac.
That way you can use the distributed features to commit code to your laptop and sync everything up easily both before you leave, and when you get home.