Live data from Hacker News

The beauty of Git in Dropbox

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: The beauty of Git in Dropbox

#12
I used this approach for my class projects a couple of years ago. It served the purpose pretty well. I used github to mainly collaborate with others while dropbox to use on different(lab/home) machines of mine.

Re: The beauty of Git in Dropbox

#13

I have for about a year now done all my work out of Dropbox (via a symlink from ~/src) it works great for multiple machines and has added advantages, eg. I never worry about deleting files that aren't staged anymore, as I can undo the delete from Dropbox’s website. Git is for long-term version control, working out of Dropbox is like having a script running that stashes and unstashes every change you make so that its…

I also do this, it's a great workflow I think.

There are occasionally conflicts, but I've never actually gotten a corrupted repository. All I ever do is go with the latest version of things using 'find' to delete the conflicts.

Re: The beauty of Git in Dropbox

#14
post #11

I'm confused, how is this better than just using github or bitbucket?

Basically you don't have to pull anymore. An example of what happens to me every day: My laptop is connected to Internet all day long, and I work on my computer iMac. I keep pushing about every hour, and when the day is over, I just close my laptop and can go on working in the train (no Internet there).

If I hadn't been using Dropbox, before leaving work, I would have to pull, and sometimes I just don't have time.

(This is one example out of many)

Re: The beauty of Git in Dropbox

#15
post #10

It is also worth noting that Dropbox saves its own revision history automatically, just like Google Docs.

Only with Pro + Packrat:

Packrat is a Dropbox Pro add-on feature that saves your file history indefinitely.

Dropbox saves a history of all deleted and earlier versions of files for 30 days for all Dropbox accounts by default. If you have the Packrat add-on, Dropbox saves those files for as long as you have the Packrat add-on. With Packrat, you never have to worry about losing an old version of a file.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/113/en

Re: The beauty of Git in Dropbox

#18
post #6

This has been discussed before as a bad idea. Unless Dropbox has improved, you'd likely run into syncing issues like I did 6 months ago. On the other hand, the top voted answer on this SO question demonstrates how one might use a Dropbox directory as a git remote, so that you can push code there intermittently, preventing the trouble with constant writes to the Dropbox. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1960799/usin…

I don't understand. Were you trying to put your repository and your working directory in Dropbox? That does, indeed, sound like a very bad idea.

Putting just `.git` in Dropbox seems like it would be fine, though.

Post reply on HN