Subversion
From Charadex
| This wiki is for the webcomic Missing Number: Adventures in Glitch City! |
| This article is written from the Real World perspective, and has nothing to do with the Missing Number comic universe. |
Subversion is a Version Control system generally deployed for source code control for computer programming projects.
We here at Missing Number HQ use Subversion to allow us to work with each other across the United States and keep a synched up version of files on both our computers.
Many times our week's work was saved by a judicious subversion commit that saved a file from certain doom.
In fact, I highly recommend a Subversion repository for any web comic, even if you're the only one working on it... although it's shininess shines brightest when you have to work with multiple people.
Basically, the system lets multiple "developers" have their own copies of the entire art file system. When you add or change files, only the bits that were changed are sent to everyone else, making sure that everyone has the latest file. If you commit a change that you shouldn't have, you can go back to any previous version of a file you want. And you can provision new repositories in minutes for new developers.
We host our subversion repository on Dreamhost's webservers; they give away free repositories with hosting accounts. For all our issues of webcomics, including all the raw files, information files, reference images, the whole shebang, comes in under a gigabyte, and updates are quick and easy.
Tortoise SVN
If you run Windows, keeping up the webcomic subversion repository is even easier... use Tortoise SVN. It's a "plugin" for Windows Explorer that allows you to do all subversion activities with a right click on a file. Super easy! We use it on both our computers and it makes collaboration quick and painless.
