Do I really need version control? [closed]

Question

Here's a scenario that may illustrate the usefulness of source control even if you work alone.

Your client asks you to implement an ambitious modification to the website. It'll take you a couple of weeks, and involve edits to many pages. You get to work.

You're 50% done with this task when the client calls and tells you to drop what you're doing to make an urgent but more minor change to the site. You're not done with the larger task, so it's not ready to go live, and the client can't wait for the smaller change. But he also wants the minor change to be merged into your work for the larger change.

Maybe you are working on the large task in a separate folder containing a copy of the website. Now you have to figure out how to do the minor change in a way that can be deployed quickly. You work furiously and get it done. The client calls back with further refinement requests. You do this too and deploy it. All is well.

Now you have to merge it into the work in progress for the major change. What did you change for the urgent work? You were working too fast to keep notes. And you can't just diff the two directories easily now that both have changes relative to the baseline you started from.

The above scenario shows that source control can be a great tool, even if you work solo.

• You can use branches to work on longer-term tasks and then merge the branch back into the main line when it's done.
• You can compare whole sets of files to other branches or to past revisions to see what's different.
• You can track work over time (which is great for reporting and invoicing by the way).
• You can recover any revision of any file based on date or on a milestone that you defined.

For solo work, Subversion or Git is recommended. Anyone is free to prefer one or the other, but either is clearly better than not using any version control. Good books are "Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion, 2nd Edition" by Mike Mason or "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" by Travis Swicegood.

There are lots of benefits, yes you need it.

• What tools/techniques can benefit a solo developer?
• Best Version control for lone developer

You don't need version control any more than a trapese artist needs a safety net. It's like backing up your hard drive—most of the time it seems redundant as nothing happens but it will be needed eventually. There's no maybes here. It will happen. And you can never predict when and the past is a poor indicator as to when it will happen. It may happen only once ever in the future but even if you know it'll happen once you won't know how bad it will be.

Yes!

Do it. It won't hurt you..

I usually switch from Laptop to PC and back and it's absolutely great to have your code somewhere in a central repository.

Sometimes it's great to go just revert to the latest revision because you screwed up something that would be too difficult to fix..

The biggest advantage that is missing is being able to re-produce the source code that generated an old build.

At build time, you tag the source control with 'Build 4.26'. The next day you start coding Build 4.27. Three months later, when a client says, "I'm using Build 4.26, and there's a bug in the Frickershaw feature. I can't upgrade to any other build because of some changes to file formats you made in build 4.27. Is there anything you can do for me? I'm willing to pay."

Then, you can checkout a branch of the 4.26 source code... fix the Frickershaw feature, and then re-build the package for the user in about an hour or two. Then you can switch back to version 4.39, and keep working.

In the same vein, you can track down the exact point at which a bug was added. Test versions 4.25 for the bug, then 4.20, then 4.10 and eventually find the bug was introduced in version 4.12. Then you look for all changes made between 'Build 4.11' and 'Build 4.12', and then focus on the Frickershaw feature. You can quickly find the source code for the bug without ever debugging it.