On 03/03/2011 07:00 AM, mcd@is-sixsigma.com wrote:
> William Couture wrote:
>> While I have worked at companies that used it, I have personally never
>> used it, and will never encourage any company that I work for to use
>> it.
>>
>> Why?
>>
>> Because it can leave you with irretrievable source code.
> This is a closed source problem, not a version control problem, and it
> goes way beyond version control.  The same is true of almost any older,
> closed-source application.
>
> And in most of the older version control systems, the code can be
> retrieved with a little scripting even if the version control program is
> lacking.
>
> Being an old fogey and having been through more platforms than I can
> count, I try pretty hard to stick to applications that are
> platform-agnostic.  That old code especially is valuable.  Although not
> every day, from time to time I find myself grabbing code from a project
> several platforms ago, rather than writing new.
>
> For ages I used RCS, which is quite old, but has the feature of being
> available on practically every platform known to man.  I have a few old
> repos that migrated from DOS to Windows to OS/2 to VMS back to Windows to
> Linux, all with no conversion.
>
> Personally, I am getting to really like git, which doesn't have this
> feature of an almost human-readable repository, but the convenience is
> terrific, and I can mirror my repos on gitorious or github and have
> convenient offsite backup as well.  Pity MPLAB doesn't directly interface
> with git, but it's no real biggie to update from the remote repo manually=
..
>
> --McD

I cannot imagine doing software development (embedded or not) without=20
version control. It has saved my bacon numerous times, as well as making=20
it very easy to keep track of what changed where and making it safer to=20
work on breaking changes, etc.

Yes, you can replicate some of that using manual copies of files and zip=20
archives, but why? VCS is designed to handle those tasks elegantly. An=20
investment in learning the tool has paid huge dividends for me over the=20
years.

I heartily second the recommendation for git. Awesome tool.

-Pete
--=20
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