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use make and version control system for every project?

David Mertz mertz at gnosis.cx
Mon Oct 6 03:43:08 EDT 2003 
|Ben Finney wrote:
|> A change history is vital on a fast-changing project; you can see when a
|> particular feature went in, when a bug was fixed, when a structural
|> change was made, etc.

Carl Banks <imbosol at aerojockey.invalid> wrote previously:
|Why is that important?  How often do you really need to know when a
|bug was fixed, for example?  (I'm serious.  I've never needed to know
|these things.  Do other people really use these features for personal
|projects?  And if they do, is it really that often?)

I've been maintaining my package Gnosis Utilities for a couple years
now.  It's a real public project--used by a fair number of people, and
with contributions from a couple dozen.  Not a -huge- project, but more
than trivial.  A bit less than a meg of pure Python and textual
documentation (I forget now what good LOC counters are, I know I tried a
couple in the past).

I've never gotten around to using any sort of version control system.
Well, unless you count keeping archives of all the old releases on my
web site.  Of course, I've also never really given anyone else "check in
priviledges" either (there are some contributors I trust quite a lot--
but even there, I still eyeball their code, and make sure I understand
what it does, why it does it, and that I like the comments and variable
names).

In those couple years, I think I have wondered about exactly when a
particular fix went in exactly ONCE.  Finding the answer was more
work than it should have been, I suppose.  I had to glance through a
couple old versions.  Actually, even then it was more about trying to
remember some old API details for backward compatibility, not really a
date question.

YMMV, of course.  And I certainly think something larger and/or more
corporate should use version control.  But I'm with Carl in not really
getting it for small semi-personal projects.

Yours, David...

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