use make and version control system for every project?

[Ben Finney]

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 03:08:57 GMT, Carl Banks wrote:
> I recommended not bothering early on because I tend to move files
> around quite a bit early on (a major pain in CVS), and I suspect I'm
> not the only person to do that.

That's a flaw of CVS, not of revision control.  Other revision control
systems (Arch, Subversion, even RCS) don't suffer from this flaw; use
any of those to have *no* excuse not to use revision control from the
project's inception.

> Incidentally, this is probably greatest strength of version control
> relative to frequent backups (for personal projects, of course).  It's
> also a feature I've found extremely little use for.  I mean, it sounds
> cool to be able to go back and see exactly when you made a certain
> change, but is that really useful in practice?

It's more than cool.

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.

A change history is vital in multi-developer projects (though that's not
what the OP asked about) to supplement fallible human memory.

A change history is required by many free software licenses (the GPL
being one) when you change another's work.

Sound useful enough?

-- 
 \        "Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a |
  `\       dotted line. He caught every other fish."  -- Steven Wright |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney <http://bignose.squidly.org/>