Version control systems

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Did you ever use SCCS? No? How about RCS? Not that either? Bah, you are all very young. But you do use a version control system, right?

These days it is rare for a developer not to use a version control system like CVS or Subversion (also known as SVN).

What I can’t figure out is why everybody doesn’t use one!

You see, lots of people write a Word file, “boringreportfortheauditor.doc”, and start working on it. If they are smart, and experienced, before making a change they make a copy and start working on “boringreportfortheauditor-version-2.doc”, and then on “boringreportfortheauditor-version-3.doc” and on it goes, and the folder fills up with files like “auditorreport4.doc”, auditor-report-final.doc", “report-for-the-auditor-reviewed-by-my-boss.doc”, “report-oops-i-got-the-deadlines-wrong.doc” and so on. The working folder is a disaster, if they use a folder at all, and don’t have it all scattered across the desktop (LNDS readers don’t do that, of course).

We programmers have this problem, but multiplied by a thousand, because users are full of creative ideas and the software keeps changing all the time, and sometimes you have to go back. Or you have code you deploy for a customer, and then a branch gets created with ad hoc modifications for one customer. The scenarios are many.

That is why we have had source code version management systems since 1972. The first ones were those I mentioned at the start of this article. Those early systems were geared toward the individual work of each programmer.

The problem came when a team of programmers worked on the same project. That gave rise to centralized systems, like CVS, SourceSafe (from Microsoft), Perforce, and the most famous of all, Subversion.

I am not going to explain here what a version control system is. I will only suggest, if you are not a programmer, that you look into these things and use them in your work. It is a good strategy (for web designers this is a very useful tool).

What I do want to get into is distributed version control systems, which are, in my opinion (and I am not alone in this), a great advance in our field. But we will leave that for the next post.