[*]if you can’t avoid having multiple people working on the same NIB, then does that one NIB manage too many unrelated components? The one place that question fails to suggest a resolution is, of course, MainMenu.nib :-(.

if you’re not tied to using Git, there’s a plugin that lets Bazaar check-out from and commit to Subversion repositories that might interest you. The name of it is bzr-svn, and you can find more information here.

Thanks for the tip about ditto, I’ll take a look at that. I know a lot of developers prefer to go the whole ‘project linking’ route. I’ve never liked that approach for 3rd party libs, even if they are open source. Just feels wrong. Yes I have the sources, but I still want to treat it like a black box if possible. It also ruins my ‘ideal’ of an encapsulated (check-out and build) project. I find it fascinating that all developers are incredibly anal about certain things, just not always the same things. Thanks for sharing!

I think the reason I felt compelled to explain source control is we’re not really sure yet who our audience is. I know we have a lot of less technical people tuning in for the “taste of developer life,” and I don’t want to marginalize them too much :) We’ll see how things evolve though, maybe it will turn out to be a more technical podcast than we were necessarily anticipating.

For the annoying subversion situation of updating binaries, I do tend to just merge the bundles, when necessary. The ditto command line tool is handy for this, because you can use it to “spray” the contents of one folder over another, without obliterating the .svn folders in the target.

In general though I try to avoid this situation by not, for instance, checking in binary frameworks to my source bases. I know it’s unavoidable in cases where for instance a licensed library is distributed only as a binary. But for the Sparkle case in particular, I use an Xcode project dependency, so that Sparkle’s framework is built from source every time and then copied into the project. No binaries in any source trees.

Daniel

1) You rely on mail filters only existing on your ‘base’ mac? Holy cow, is it 2001 again?? I personally moved all my domains to Google Apps and couldn’t be happier (but admittedly it’s not for everyone).

2) Considering your audience, it was probably a bit overkill to explain what ’source control’ is. ;-)

3) I’ve also been looking into switching to Git, etc. Unfortunately I simply don’t have the time now for looking deeper into it, so it was great to hear opinions of devs in a similar position to myself. While I’m stuck with Subversion, will you please answer one question: How the heck do you update an embedded framework (ie. Sparkle) in your SVN project? Do you delete and add? Or filemerge the bundles? What a PITA bundles + .svn folders are.

Anyways, sorry about the huge comment, but thanks to you both for the podcast… it was a great listen.

Out of curiosity, how do you guys handle branching and merging NIB/XIB files?

Heh. Very carefully. :)

Merging or even diffing nib changes sucks. So I always try to be disciplined and remember to check in ASAP when I make any substantive change. It does raise a good question though, about how a distributed system might make for a tougher merge when nib changes come back into the mainline. I guess I’ll have to see how that goes. At least, though, with the offline commits you can annotate the changes with comments as you go.