Incremental changes and rollback

[Ben Kirkpatrick]

   I do lots of little changes, roughing out a program very slowly.  I may compile and test a program 50+ times before it's exactly the way I want it.  (A lot of this is learning curve; I only get 20 minute increments to play with).  I made a little change to COMPILE.BAT which records the changes made each time I compile.

Add these lines just before the call to GCBASIC:

echo "=====================" >> %1.log
   date /T >> %1.log
   time /T >> %1.log
   echo "=====================" >> %1.log
   c:\cygwin\bin\diff %1.bak %1 >> %1.log
   copy %1 %1.bak

You will need to do a minimal install of a program called CYGWIN in order to get the utility called "diff".  This is the thing that compares two versions of a file and prints the difference.  Available at http://www.cygwin.org/cygwin/ , this add many unix tools to windows.

If you get this setup correctly, after the first run or two, you'll see files called *.log which match the name of source files you compiled.  If you break something or make a bad decision, go to this file to remind you what was changed recently.  It's sequential, so you may need to go to the end of the file to see the last change.

-Ben

[Ben Kirkpatrick]

So for example, here's what it would log if I went in to change a temperature conversion:

C:\PROGRA~1\GCBASIC>more SingleTC.txt.log

"====================="
Sat 07/24/2010
07:00 PM
"====================="
92,94c92,94
< TempW = TempW / 9
< TempW = TempW * 5
< TempW = TempW - 32
--
> TempW = TempW * 9
> TempW = TempW / 5
> TempW = TempW + 32

C:\PROGRA~1\GCBASIC>more SingleTC.txt.log