Ask Slashdot: Taming a Wild, One-Man Codebase? 151
New submitter tavi.g writes "Working for an ISP, along with my main job (networking) I get to create some useful code (Bash and Python) that's running on various internal machines. Among them: glue scripts, Cisco interaction / automatization tools, backup tools, alerting tools, IP-to-Serial OOB stuff, even a couple of web applications (LAMPython and CherryPy). Code has piled up — maybe over 20,000 lines — and I need a way to reliably work on it and deploy it. So far I used headers at the beginning of the scripts, but now I'm migrating the code over to Bazaar with TracBzr, because it seems best for my situation. My question for the Slashdot community is: in the case of single developer (for now), multiple machines, and a small-ish user base, what would be your suggestions for code versioning and deployment, considering that there are no real test environments and most code just goes into production ? This is relevant because lacking a test environment, I got used to immediate feedback from the scripts, since they were in production, and now a versioning system would mean going through proper deployment/rollback in order to get real feedback."
It's too late (Score:5, Funny)
Rename the files f1, f2, f3, etc. (Score:5, Funny)
Keep a translation sheet on you at all times. Suddenly, you're irreplaceable.
(:-) for the humor impaired. This is actually a riff on a joke from WKRP, when an engineer said he was replacing all the color-coded wiring with black wires for job security. (B.t.w. the engineer was played by one of the writers of the show)