slightly OT - github for max abstractions?

hey
soundstroll is on github :)
There is a workflow and some basic concepts to understand when working on github. There is a lot of starting guide on the webz.
The basic concept is as follow : your code is inside a "git repository" which is mirrorred on your machine (local repository) and online (online repository). A repository is a standard folder structure with some hidden git config text files inside each subfolder, which keep track of everything you change. When you make a change to your code (in the local repos), you need to "commit" it locally in order for git to update the logs. The log updating is automatic, which is nice, you just need to ask for the update. To do all those things required by the git system, you can either use a command-line git tool (it's working allright) or there are a lot of GUI available to do that (i don't know them). Once everything is commited, you can "push" your local repository to the online one ; which means mirroring the content of the local folder into the online one. Then there are the collaborating tools like forks (copying an online repository into your account), pull request (asking for the changes you make to be mirrored in the main project) and a lot of other things i don't grasp.
It is very useful if you have a project with several people involved ; but i guess it's still useful for humbler projects ; it's a neat interface.
There are other more serious max things on github : HOA, package downloader, toolbox, jamoma, o.io.leap... The only drawback for max compared to an other coding language is that patchers will be displayed as text on the github site. I think there was a discussion once to know if it was possible to render it graphically on the site, as there is a tool that renders the graphic of a patch online.
There are other site/tools like BitBucket or SourceForge with advantages and disadvantages. It's a bit beyond me to compare those though.

thanks for the writeup, Vichug - especially from the viewpoint of a maxer.

See, now I'm back to thinking that I just need some kind of version control... or perhaps not even that, maybe I can make do with the Tools system here on cycling74.com. Hmm.
thanks again.

Hahah same issue here, now slightly in the future. Did you find a nice solution, @Wetterburger?

you can upload anything you want to github, but why would you do it? arent there better places?

Do share your suggestions then :)

my favorite part about using max with git is that I can use `git reset` to easily undo any changes I made to individual files if I mess them up too much.

There was also one time when I had to `git checkout` an old commit to copy code that I had deleted, back into the current version. If I had structured my project "properly" with a ton of abstractions then I could've done that entirely within git, instead of manually copy-pasting, but I haven't had to do this often enough to warrant refactoring the main patch into a bunch of abstractions.

It's also nice to `git clone` directly to Max 8/Packages. Then when the package gets an update, you can simply `git pull`, instead of downloading, unzipping, and replacing.

I would add two suggestions to Roman's question about, Why git? First, using a git feature branch workflow is a really great way to try something out when you do not have 100% confidence that it will work out.

For example, I have a big idiosyncratic sequencer. It's a big bespoke Max patch with lots of abstractions. I wanted to try swapping out the underlying timing/clock bits using gen. But this touches a lot of the abstractions. By starting this refactoring in a branch, it really eases the anxiety of getting back to last known good state for the entire project and not just a single file.

Second, in terms of sharing a project, you can git tag... a release that will create a zip or tarball at a given snapshot.