Any in-house corporate developers?

[Ben Rubinstein]

On 17/02/2012 07:31, Malte Brill wrote:
>> So what about source control, any applicability here.   Are Diffs possible?
>>
>
> Not easiely. The binary nature of a stack makes this incredibly difficult. It is possible to write a little plugin that exports all scripts to plain text and, to a certain extend it is possible to export a stack to XML and recreate it from that. However, version control and colaborative work are not exactly easy in liveCode. For me this is the only major downside of liveCode.

It's the combination of the binary nature of the stack, and the monolithic 
nature.  What in other development systems would be a 'project' consisting of 
lots of text files and other assets, is in LiveCode a single file.

We use a plugin, originally written to do versioning saves, to which we added 
code to save an XML 'side-car' file each time the stack is saved.  The 
side-car is usually all the scripts in the stack, although it can also include 
text of fields and properties (configured by adding a custom property to the 
stack).

So every time we commit a stack to our source control system (we use 
Subversion) we commit the side-car file at the same time.

This is a sticking plaster - it makes it easy to do diffs - but that's all. 
We're still stuck manually merging changes if necessary; and because of the 
monolithic nature, it would be necessary more often that in another 
development system.

This is certainly one of the major issues in our shop against LiveCode.

I know that RunRev have been interested in addressing this issue, but I 
suspect that the initiative on this front has been sidelined by the massive 
task of supporting the new mobile platforms.

Ben