It's a little obnoxious and distracting, while slowing the process..

Hi Mark,

I know what you mean.

We found version control systems generally required a message, and theoretically it is good practice, so we kept to that initially. Perhaps an alternative may be to provide a default message? Or another idea? Or say it is good habits and continue require it?

Be interested what you/others think.

Simon

I would agree that requiring comments on a personal project could be onerous but once you have support for shared projects then comments become more important.

As an Objective-C programmer I have come to realise just how important verbosity is in software development.

I think forcing a comment is a good way to get people new to software development into good habits. I welcome anything that improves the quality of software :)

I see the benefits.. But is it possible to make a checkbox or something in the bar that would allow you to disable it for like 10 turns or something? I'm sure some other less experienced people might agree that while you're programming by shotgun and compiling about 30times a minute to see if it works, it breaks the train of thought to have unexpected messages pop up...

I should note that I might have posted on a knee jerk before noticing there actually is still a save button...(duh)... =/

Just my thoughts.. I'll just probably get used to it and not really benefit from it....

Yeah, if you are on a roll and just trying something out, you wouldn't commit until you had something you were happy with :)

I also want to note that Flash only has approx 10,000 erase/write cycles... You should think twice before making a trivial change and burning up one of those cycles ;)

My 2¢ is to recommend keeping it, as a required step. [Optional if need be, but I'd default it on]

I've used version control for many years - both for professional and hobby development. Much of the 'history' may go unreviewed, but then you may find it important to walk backin time, and here this is very helpful. I don't think I'm alone in this.

Those that have not used version control before may end up typing 'asdf' to satisfy the check-in requirement. Those same folks will sooner or later find themselves not with a 50 line program but with 10 to 50 modules of hundreds to thousands of lines of code. Patching a bad run of code over and over usually makes it even more hacked up and hard to maintain. Much better is to recognize the bad path one is on and then deliberately back up to a good revision to start again. Having reasonably good comments in the history will help find that good version to branch from without having to diff the files over and over. It takes some discipline to actually throw away bad code rather than trying to get it to submit to your will to make it good. I still find myself going too far down the bad path, but I know I can back up gracefully.

I'd go along with David's comments - it's invaluable when you need it and well worth a few words to help you remember what you've just broken (but haven't realised yet!).

Maybe the option to turn it off is worthwhile to suit all tastes but I'd recommend people try to use it on any code except a true throw-away prototype app...and never trust anyone (except yourself) to throw it away...

I'm glad to have it but am quite happy for others to disagree!