On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 2:44 PM, Peter Loron wrote= : > I cannot imagine doing software development (embedded or not) without > version control. It has saved my bacon numerous times, as well as making > it very easy to keep track of what changed where and making it safer to > work on breaking changes, etc. > > Yes, you can replicate some of that using manual copies of files and zip > archives, but why? VCS is designed to handle those tasks elegantly. An > investment in learning the tool has paid huge dividends for me over the > years. > > I heartily second the recommendation for git. Awesome tool. > > -Pete Most of us are writing code for someone else, be they a "boss" or customer. If someone says: "what exactly did you change?" and you can't answer the question as a matter of fact, you might look a little silly. I worked on a dsPIC project with 3 other developers concurrently, and there was no way it would have worked if we weren't using some revision control. It just happens to be a lot easier when there is software that does the diffs and tracking for you. I use Mercurial, I like it because it's distributed. There is no master repository as a limitation of the revision control. In the example I mentioned, we used KilnHG to serve the repository to all of the developers. It graphically shows forks, lineage, merges, all history, etc. Being able to go back and see exactly which lines of code changed has helped me be more productive. I can also see exactly what OTHER people are doing to code that might affect what I'm working on. I also happen to touch about 5 different projects in a month, and usually I'm working alone on the code. I can't remember every detail about every code base, regardless of how good my memory (or documentation) is. Seeing old commit messages and diffs in Tortoise-HG refreshes my memory. It took about 2 hours to learn how to use Mercurial and it has saved me many times that. --=20 Martin K. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .