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Re: Can you get a package back to a notebook easily?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg82953] Re: Can you get a package back to a notebook easily?
• From: Thomas E Burton <tburton at brahea.com>
• Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 06:14:46 -0500 (EST)

Correction to the following note, previously posted: CVS isn't an IDE  
(Integrated Development Environment). Rather, it's a version control  
system. The following makes more sense if you substitute VCS for IDE.

Tom

> No, reading a package into the front end as a notebook is  
> unsatisfactory: you get back only initialized input cells, in  
> rather poor condition, and everything else is lost. Why bother? The  
> reverse is true: you can easily reconstruct a package from a notebook.
>
>> I am asking this because I want to know if I need to save my  
>> notebook and my package in CVS, or only my package?
>
> Back in the old days (version 3?), notebooks would become unstable  
> when ported between operating systems (Mac and Windows in my case).  
> I think Wolfram is well beyond this issue now, but I remain  
> skittish. No way am I going to trust a notebook to an IDE like CVS.  
> So what I do is sync the packages into the IDE and store the  
> notebooks elsewhere. (I keep four copies of important notebooks!  
> Two on computers, one on local backup, one on remote backup.) If  
> the IDE fouls up, I can easily recreate versions of the packages  
> from my notebooks.
>
> One compromise with this approach is that I don't keep all versions  
> of all notebooks. (My notebooks are typically 2-100 megabytes  
> each.) So the selection of saved notebooks will not always  
> correspond exactly to the sync'ed packages, but I get away with it.