use make and version control system for every project?

[Roy Smith]

Carl Banks <imbosol at aerojockey.invalid> wrote:
> Version control, it depends.  I've used CVS for some personal projects
> before, and can't say I've ever found it useful, and it's definitely a
> pain to keep things up-to-date.  I recommend, for personal projects,
> not bothering with version control at least until the project is
> fairly stable.

I suppose this is a personal preference kind of thing, but I use 
revision control (CVS or RCS mostly, Clearcase when they hold a gun to 
my head) for everything, from the very beginning.  Source code, 
documents, test notes, project plans, it all goes under revision 
control.  I check stuff in often and early.

I do that even if it's just something I'm working on for myself.  It 
might be a little silly, but that's what I've found works well for me.  
For any project with more than one person working on it, however, you 
would be insane not to use some sort of revision control system.

I find it gives me a lot of value.  There's the built-in backups 
(although, the CVS repository itself needs to be backed up).  There's 
the running commentary of the checkin messages (I'm pretty anal about 
trying to keep a good checkin log).  There's the ability to branch a 
file to explore some experimental changes.  If you don't like CVS, there 
are plenty of other revision control systems to look at, ranging from 
free to mega-bucks.

I don't see a whole lot of value for make in a python project.  I use it 
myself mostly to drive unit test suites, but that's more force of habit 
than anything else.  I should probably replace those Makefiles with 
python scripts :-)  If you don't like make (and there's plenty not to 
like), there are other, newer, systems around like Ant and Jam that are 
worth looking at.

Of course, none of this really has much to do with Python.  These are 
all generic software engineering issues.