How Do You Control Your Source Code?

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
It's like doing backups. Everyone knows he/she should do it, but most don't. Then one day you screw up, you find a backup from 2 weeks ago, and you just lost 2 weeks worth of work. Now from this point on you'll never ever make that mistake again and fix your backups properly.

The same can be said about versioning. It makes your work easier. That little change you made that accidentally broke something somewhere else, you can just 'undo' that particular change and it doesn't matter when you did it. It could be months ago. Now imagine for a second you did a change 2 months ago. And you have emailed yourself every release from that point. Then you need to undo that particular piece of code. What do you do?

Do you grab the backup from 2 months ago and discard all your changes you did since then? Do you manually go about editing every file that is affected? What if you code was all over the place?

All the problems disappear (ideally) when you use version control. And I haven't even started about branching It gives you the power to 'try out something new', without changing anything from your 'stable' code. If in the end it works, you merge it back with your trunk (or master tree) and your changes are now officially added. You decide your code isn't working, you throw it all away. You find out 2 months later the code you added isn't compatible with some 3rd party API or library? You just undo those changes.

So you see using revision control is a very powerful tool. Seeing as you are the sole developer and everything falls to you, I would agree with jedd and would recommend git.