Version Management

The only thing that's constant is change. That holds for life and for programming, as well. As programs get more and more complex, the more they need to be maintained. Even if you debug your code and release a perfect product, it's likely that you will want to make a change sometime in the future, a new feature or an overlooked security issue, for instance. Version Control is akin to an assistant that keeps track of every change you make to your code to assure that each change you make to your code is logged and kept track of. Acting like save points in a videogame, version control makes it obvious what changed and allows you to revert your code to a previous version if needed.

As a requirement for one of my classes, we had to use Subversion along with Google Code to host our robocode project (the result can be found here.) Having experimented with Git while working with Heroku, Subversion came intuitively to me. Both have command-line and gui interfaces, though with linux the command-line is really the best way to go about your files. With Subversion, you can make changes to your local directory that subversion will note to change on your remote server. It's easy as 'svn commit' when it comes to updating your source. To upload your code to a remote server is easy, too, as 'svn import URL' allows you to import your base directory to the path, assuming that the path is configured for subversion management.

The only thing I miss from git is an easy-to-find ignore list like .gitignore, but for the purposes of uploading a robocode robot to google project, interfacing directly with the folder proved just fine (though it resulted in way more versions than I had planned.) Other than that, managing versions of your software is easy as import, edit, commit.