I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day about version control and why it’s necessary. So I decided to throw together a few options and a little explanation about why its important.
I have been using version control in some form or another for many years. I started with CVS, then moved to Subversion (which I still use quite a bit), and now, as my latest post about Git GUI’s on the Mac suggests, I have moved to Git. The one thing that has been consistent across every single transition has been that I had some sort of remote code storage every time. During the CVS days, I used a CVS pserver and stored my code locally and remotely for safety (and ease of checkout/deployment). For subversion, I always stored my code locally and used an apache install somewhere with a WebDAV module to get at and deploy whatever code is necessary.
Ultimately I use remote code storage for 2 reasons, back up my existing code base (so I have it in more than one place) and to have a visualization of what is going on in your project. That visualization is handy to be used as a central consistent view for multiple people (unlike a personal client which can be different per user).
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