Hello, a brief topic on Version Control Systems. I have used a few in the past mostly with Subversion – SVN. I liked this product very much. This product can be found at http://subversion.apache.org/
Extensive free documentation on SVN can be found at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
Now, what is version control?
The code, programmers write changes often. Bugs need to be fixed, features need to be added, and content needs to be changed.
Most code is stored as plain old text files, and the code is changed by editing these files. Every time a change is saved, the old version of the file is overwritten with a new one.
Unfortunately, no programmer is perfect, and sometimes, mistakes are made. If you make a change to a file, save it, compile it, and find out that something went wrong, it’s often helpful to be able to go back to the old version or to get a report of what was actually changed, in order to focus on what may have gone wrong.
That’s where Version Control Systems come in. (Sourced from Altassian).
A bit more about Distributed Version Control systems
There are many version control systems out there. Often they are divided into two groups: “centralized” and “distributed”.
Centralized version control systems are based on the idea that there is a single “central” copy of your project somewhere (probably on a server), and programmers will “commit” their changes to this central copy.
Recently a new breed of tools has appeared: so-called “distributed” version control systems (DVCS for short). The three most popular of these are Mercurial, Git and Bazaar. These systems do not necessarily rely on a central server to store all the versions of a project’s files. Instead, every developer “clones” a copy of a repository and has the full history of the project on their own hard drive. This copy (or “clone”) has all of the metadata of the original.
This method may sound wasteful, but in practice, it’s not a problem. (sourced from Altassian).
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_revision_control
