Item — HN Reader

Hmmm. I've been storing Git repos in Dropbox for... ages. Haven't tried sharing them, but for a single user I see no need to have an additional piece of software.

I am, however, quite interested in the potential for business-related repos - I guess it all depends on the authentication and transport mechanisms (I assume this will be using Dropbox's auth and TLS API)?

1 comments

Have you used DB for your repos where you work on different machines that are not always on, and therefore there is a sync delay occasionally? And then get conflicted syncs on DB's end as a result when you try to interact with the repo before syncing is done across all machines? There are many headaches to just putting a git repo in DB and forgetting about it -- the one possible exception if you are only working on one machine all the time, with zero collaborators.

I use DB across many machines, some "permanently" on, two laptops and a (sporadically on) home desktop. Never had a conflict I couldn't recover from - and the 5-10 minutes some of the machines take to finish syncing are usually best spent catching up on e-mail rather than coding.

This is bad engineering. You are asking for trouble. Don't use DropBox for this use case.

I've been doing this since Dropbox 1.0. Haven't had any serious issues since 2.x, and the benefits of having my complete working state available everywhere far outweigh the risks.

You may be ignoring the risk that people hear you're doing this and decide not to take you seriously as an engineer. There are clever Dropbox productivity hacks. This is not one of them.

If people were to form such an opinion of me based on that, I wouldn't take them seriously as peers.

There is no magic involved, and if a git repo ever breaks (which, ironically, last happened on a SCM server), I know enough about the internals to fix it by hand.

(although I would probably simply rewind Time Machine or pull from the central repo if it happened on my Mac - less time and hassle)

I just realized that by "DB" you meant "DropBox." I was reading it as "database" and thought you were putting MySQL files on DropBox! Hopefully my strong words make more sense now... apologies!