Source Control Done Right

Your introduction to source control probably was a lot like mine: “here’s how you open SourceSafe, here’s your login, and here’s how you get your files... now get to work.”

For the most part, that works just fine. We’re already familiar with the nature of files and directories, so introducing the concepts of checking-in and checking-out aren’t a huge leap. Repositories, merging, and committing become second-nature just as easily.

But there’s a whole lot more to source control than just that. And, as someone in a fairly unique position of working with virtually every source control system out there (a hazard of the day job: BuildMaster needs to integrate with them all), I’ve learned that there are far more similarities than differences.

This especially holds true with the latest breed of distributed version control systems. Sure, certain operations may be easier to do – but if they’re the wrong thing to do, then it’s that much easier to make mistakes.
Back to Basics

If we’re going to take a good, hard look at source control, let’s do something we should have all done a long time ago, before even touching a source control client. Let’s go back to the basics. The very basics.

It all starts with bits: an unfathomably large and virtually endless stream of 1’s and 0’s. Whether it’s the 16,000,000 on a 3.5”floppy disk or the 4,000,000,000,000 on a desktop hard drive, bits represent a line – the first dimension – and, in and of themselves, bits are entirely meaningless.

That’s where the second dimension – the file system – comes in.

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