Depending on how well changes have been synchronized previously, you may encounter conflicts that must be rectified, but Git and Mercurial can help you pinpoint those conflicts down to individual lines of code. For a given DVCS codebase, any repository can be synchronized with any other repository by merging the recorded changes. Rather than thinking in terms of a central codebase and local working repositories, a DVCS treats all repositories - local, on a team server or in the cloud - as snapshots of a codebase at any point in time or development. The "distributed" part of a DVCS is also important. It also makes conflicts far easier to sort out. This makes the change history fast, lightweight and extremely specific.
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That means, when you check in changes, rather than making a new version of your entire code file, software like Git and Mercurial only record the specific changes - character insertions and deletions. Two significant features set them apart from previous VCSes you may have encountered.įirst, these systems record "atomic" changes to your codebase. They're easy to use for local development, providing simple version control for saving or rolling back changes, managing development branches and even a sort of simplified package management system for codebases. Modern source control software such as Git and Mercurial are examples of distributed version control systems (DVCSes). They're also generally lightweight, easy to install, easy to learn and incredibly flexible. There are a variety of different systems to choose from to suit different needs and preferences. Today, data corruption is almost unheard of. Source code control systems - also known as version control systems (VCSes) - have come a long way in recent years. There was a central code repository, you'd wait for other developers to check in their work, you'd check out files to edit them, you'd check edited files back in - and the database would corrupt all of the week's work. What's source code control? In ye olde days, you may have struggled with Visual SourceSafe: Microsoft's Source Destruction System or systems like it. Source code control is just as important today, and not just for teams individual programmers benefit as much from quality source code control software (and good code check-in practices) as do teams or worldwide open source projects.
Do you use source control tools to manage your software development process? Source control was the very first item on Joel Spolsky's Joel Test for the quality of a development team back in 2000.