aka RTFD.
I was very happy to see this blog post this morning(I read it Feb 02, but didn’t finish writing this post until now). It reminded me that I find great value in doing this, even though I rarely do it. I shall be doing this more often as of now.
Do you work as part of a software team? Here’s a piece of advice for you:
Read the diffs.
Every morning before you start your own coding tasks, use your favorite diff tool to look at all the changes that everybody else checked in the day before.
in SVN, it is as easy as svn log –r –2; svn diff –r –2, assuming there is just one commit that you missed.
The same command works for bzr: bzr log –r –2; bzr diff –r –2.
Assuming you work in the real world where there is more than one commit since you last read the log, you will need to read since your last revision. In this work flow, you really should read the commit log and diffs every type you pull an update. I use a script which looks like this:
$svn log -r `svn info|grep Revision|cut -f2 -d’ ‘`:HEAD
with bzr it looks like this (a little more complex since we aren’t used to getting this type of information remotely)
$bzr log -r `bzr log -r -1 | grep revno | awk -F: ‘{print $2}’`.. `bzr info | grep "checkout of branch" | awk ‘{print $4}’`
I’m pretty bad at this, so I highly recommend some web UI. ViewVC or Loggerhead are both great UI for this. Both Loggerhead and ViewVC offer RSS feeds for the logs of your SVN or BZR repository respectively.
If you are running subversion, please consider installing ViewVC. If you are running bazaar, please consider installing Loggerhead.