Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

Using VC Effectively

Finally, we urge those of you with prior version control experience to heed the following maxim: to use VC effectively, check in your changes early and often!

If you’re used to version control interfaces that are as clumsy and difficult as bare SCCS, RCS, or CVS, your reflexes may prevent you from getting the most leverage out of VC. You probably won’t save often; you’re not used to being able to instantly get status reports on a whole subtree of files; you are not likely to automatically think of using features like symbolic snapshot names to mark releases.

It’s worth a little thought and effort to reeducate yourself. You’ll find that, instead of being an irritating minor chore, version control under VC can be tremendously liberating. By checking changes in often, you’ll find you can afford to experiment more, because you’ll be sure of how to revert to a known good state quickly if need be.

Your thinking about distributed development may change when you realize how easy it is, when using VC, to make guaranteed complete patch sets between releases or between checked-in sources and your changed workfiles. This feature has large implications for reducing the coefficient of friction in loosely coupled development projects—especially projects in which developers keep their own local copies of sources in parallel and in which the main channel of communication is electronic mail. While VC is far from a perfect solution to this synchronization problem, experience shows ...