Automatic shelving, anyone? No, thanks...

As I am catching up with the blog reading (still have some thousand posts to browse through in my blog reader), I came across interesting post by Grant Holliday.

In a nutshell, there is a new project at CodePlex by William Bartholomew, called QuickShelve, a little utility application that may be used to set up automatic shelving on your machine. Initially, I was pretty excited about it - I am a soldier in "small-free-app-save-big-buck" army myself. But then I thought better of it, and become doubtful that auto shelving is (will be) universally needed, and here is why:

• You need to set up the app on your local machine, since this will only work when agent is running locally. Ah, I wish it could be set up at server...


• When one shelves some changes, it is usually files at certain stage of development ("wow, it works now", "hell, it ceased to work", "i am afraid to change this" etc). Auto shelving, on the other hand, will shelve at some point in time and it wont be easy to identify what exactly is inside


• And lastly - people should check in often. Admin (or team lead) can and should enforce that policy, and may be even monitor the shelving so that no one is tempted use shelvesets as substitutes for checked in changesets. And anything that takes you away from that "daily check in is a must" is a devil's work.

So overall while auto shelving in its current form might be a good way to prevent force major circumctances (hard drive crash etc.), I will wait until it can be set up and administered at server level. That would be a nice feature (Rosario people, are you listening?).