Question

I am a student and I always develop projects on my own, mainly with Ruby On Rails.

I noticed that even a simple project may become complex if you can’t easily rescue deleted code and pass from a version to another. Time Machine backups are not enough.

I would like to use a version control system, but they seem not to be intended for single-user projects. Am I wrong? If so, what policy and software do you use for managing your code?

Answer 1

It is definitely a good idea to use version control software, and other project software on your own projects. These tools are not just for team working, although they allow team working. Beyond the obvious reasons for keeping track of your changes to the project it is a good idea to use SCM tools so you are familar with what the industry is using.

Subversion is widespread, and is quite a good bet as it’s successfully replaced the earlier and older CVS tool. It relies on a central repository where the code is stored and can be backed up: where I have used SVN for personal projects and small team projects I have backed up to CD. If your project is opensource there are sites like sourceforge that support svn which you can use for hosting.

However as some of the other posters have indicated, a personal project might benefit more from a distributed system: git is increasing in popularity since git-hub has come online and porting efforts to are succeeding. http://git-scm.com/ It is likely that tools like these will grow in popularity over the coming years as they allow a greater number of people to participate on the same code. The idea of one central repository is relaxed giving each developer the ability to version track different designs and only give back to the community the versions they complete.

One of the benefits with using SCM for all projects personal or not, is that a separate server can be set up testing a version of the code. Automated testing on the latest version of the code (using a Continuous Integration Server or similar) can improve the quality of the software you are writing.

Some highly experienced software developers talk about a rhythm where they make incremental changes checking in frequently. Getting into the habit of making small changes which are complete and checking them in: is a good practice to get into for group working.