I was just talking to another developer (more senior than I) and trying to convince him that we should implement continuous integration via Cruise Control. He told me that this will not work because he commits code that does not compile to the repository all the time for the purposes of backing it up. And that automated builds notifying us of failures would be just noise.
Committing garbage to the repo sounds bad to me. But I was at a loss of words and didn’t know what to say. What is the alternative? What’s the best practice for backing up your code on another machine without adding a bunch of pointless revisions?
BTW, our version control system is SVN and that probably won’t change any time soon.
Develop in branches and commit ready to test and hopefully working branches into the main line. Let the continuous integration server depend on the main line (in svn most times called trunk) for new revisions to build and validate.