On 17/02/2012 07:31, Malte Brill wrote:
So what about source control, any applicability here.   Are Diffs possible?


Not easiely. The binary nature of a stack makes this incredibly difficult. It 
is possible to write a little plugin that exports all scripts to plain text 
and, to a certain extend it is possible to export a stack to XML and recreate 
it from that. However, version control and colaborative work are not exactly 
easy in liveCode. For me this is the only major downside of liveCode.

It's the combination of the binary nature of the stack, and the monolithic nature. What in other development systems would be a 'project' consisting of lots of text files and other assets, is in LiveCode a single file.

We use a plugin, originally written to do versioning saves, to which we added code to save an XML 'side-car' file each time the stack is saved. The side-car is usually all the scripts in the stack, although it can also include text of fields and properties (configured by adding a custom property to the stack).

So every time we commit a stack to our source control system (we use Subversion) we commit the side-car file at the same time.

This is a sticking plaster - it makes it easy to do diffs - but that's all. We're still stuck manually merging changes if necessary; and because of the monolithic nature, it would be necessary more often that in another development system.

This is certainly one of the major issues in our shop against LiveCode.

I know that RunRev have been interested in addressing this issue, but I suspect that the initiative on this front has been sidelined by the massive task of supporting the new mobile platforms.

Ben

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