Plone version control, how?

Question

Hello, I'm trying to get into Python and, more specifically, Zope and Plone. I read the book Professional Plone Development and one thing it says is that one MUST use version control. But the book did not expand on that topic any further. This leads to two questions.

First: SVN or git? (My research points to git, if only to learn it. I've only used SVN so far.)

And second: Which files should be handled by version control? Settings and my own code? The whole Zope directory? Not the data.fs, surely? Not the .pyc files, I'm sure of that. I've taken a break from Plone for that reason these days, and I couldn't find a good guide for that. In short, so far, when I synchronised the data between my local PC and my web server, things broke. Badly. And I'm not sure why. Either some updates were missing, or some platform-specific files were updated. My home PC is 64 bit Ubuntu and my distant web server is 32 bit RHEL. It felt like such a mess, and like such a dangerous mess, that I'm a bit apprehensive of going back near it.

Is there a way to know which files should be handled by a version control system and which should not?

Thanks.

Answer 1

To the first question: whatever system suits your fancy. Subversion and Git are both decent options. A potential plus for Git (or another DVCS like Mercurial or Bazaar) are that they're a lot more straightforward to set up in a local directory - generally just a single command.

To the second: basically, put anything that's not a transient file under source control. So yes, exclude pyc/pyo files, and also any test database files et cetera, but anything that's code should probably be versioned. Config files are a toss-up - some people put them in version control, others don't.

Answer 2

I put only my buildout files into svn (dir: project/buildout/trunk). Buildout fetches all Plone/Zope files in the right versions.

Additionally i put my eggs in svn (dir: project/eggs/trunk). My eggs hold all the modifications into Plone.

My buildout uses mr.developer to auto fetches my eggs.

You ca check http://toutpt.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/nantes-developpement-com-a-new-plone-website-by-makina-corpus/ its a big buildout and uses all kind of mods and extensions.