Becoming a Software Developer Part 3: Version Control for Fun and Profit
Introduction
In this third article in my "Becoming a Software Developer" series, I'm going to step away from programming for a short while and look at an issue that affects all software developershow to manage all of the changing versions of files as a project moves forward.
Most developers have been bitten by a small change somewhere breaking the application somewhere else. Normally it starts fairly innocently. You run your application to check that a new feature worksand discover that something else has stopped working. Being a careful developer, you try running the version you saved last night. Horror of horrors, that doesn't work either, even though you know it was working yesterday. In desperation, you try a different version on another machine; it sort of works, but other things are broken...welcome to the nightmare.