

Empirical Evidence for the Value of Version Control? - dalke
http://www.neverworkintheory.org/?p=451

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dalke
I submitted this because I'm curious about the answer. In all the discussion
of experimental evidence for pair programming, TDD, etc., has anyone carried
out research to test the effectiveness of using a version control system?

For some projects, it seems that an automatic versioning file system might be
more effective than, say, github.

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dennisgorelik
That's an interesting idea: automatically commit every change during
development.

I guess developer may choose to label current set of files as "share with
other developers on my team" or "production ready". IDE may also auto-assign
labels such as "buildable" and "auto-tests passed".

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dalke
Yes.

And a hybrid solution might be a directory watcher which auto-commits the
files which are in version control after every save.

BTW, there's also vim's "go back in time" feature, which lets you go back,
say, 2 hours in development to an earlier version of a file.

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dennisgorelik
Auto-commit after every save would likely break the build for other developers
on the team.

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dalke
Under some version control systems, you can commit to your own local
repository, which no one else uses. When you're ready, you can push your
repository out to others.

With Mercurial, git, and other such system, you can auto-save without
affecting others. Only when you push to trunk (if that's your development
model) could you break the build.

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dennisgorelik
Sorry, I forgot about distributed source control systems...

Yes, such system (keep EVERY version in source control) might be convenient to
work with: no need to think about when you need to commit your code changes.
The code history switches from being "set of isolated snapshots" into kind of
movie.

