Everybody<\/i> agrees that version control (VC) is the right thing but, sadly, too often it’s ignored anyway. I use version control—Git via Magit—in two ways. First, it’s the primary way that I keep my machines synchronized. I could, of course, use something like Dropbox for this but Git works well for me and I’ve automated the process so I see no reason to change. The point is that synchronization is not something you need<\/i> version control for. <\/p>\n
The real reason for VC is that you have a history of the changes you’ve made and that, as a result, it’s easy to drop back to a previous state if you code (or write) yourself into a box. Eric Raymond has a revealing post neatly demonstrates the virtues of version control<\/a>. He writes about a \u201cphase-of-the-moon bug\u201d that, despite frequent and comprehensive regression tests, suddenly appeared after a commit. Nothing too strange about that but when he dropped back to the previous commit the regression tests still failed even though they had passed just a few minutes ago. <\/p>\n It turned out that several commits had the mysterious bug but Raymond was able to locate the culprit pretty quickly with Git bisect<\/a>. Even if you’re not a Git user, you could still perform the bisection process manually although a good deal less conveniently. The real enabling mechanism was VC. Without it, he’d have had a long and frustrating ordeal of trying to locate each change and test if it was the genesis of the problem. <\/p>\n I’ve heard many developers express the opinion that they don’t need VC because they work alone. As Raymond’s story illustrates, VC can save the day even for the lone developer1<\/a><\/sup>. Hop on over and read Raymond’s post and see if it doesn’t convince you that you should be using VC whether or not you’re working alone. <\/p>\n The code Raymond was working on, GPSD, is, in fact, a multi-developer project but that doesn’t come into play here. The story takes place while he was working alone and all the code was his. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everybody agrees that version control (VC) is the right thing but, sadly, too often it’s ignored anyway. I use version control—Git via Magit—in two ways. First, it’s the primary way that I keep my machines synchronized. I could, of course, … Continue reading Footnotes: <\/h2>\n