“Karl Fogel’s new book combines open-source philosophy with
documentation on an important tool in the open-source developer’s
toolkit.“
“Version control isn’t terribly sexy. It also isn’t terribly
fun. But it is terribly important. Version control is a necessity
in a team environment and close to a necessity even for solo
developers — ask anyone who’s accidentally overwritten a source
file how nice it would be to have a backup of every version of that
file.”
“Version control is even more important if you want to
participate in open-source projects. Though many open-source
projects make their source code available in downloadable packages,
those packages are usually not the latest available code. The
freshest code is what’s available in the project’s version control
system. Open-source projects like Mozilla, the GIMP, and GNOME rely
on CVS — the Concurrent Versions System. CVS is itself open source
and is maintained by SourceGear Corp. (after SourceGear acquired
Cyclic Software this summer). Many open-source projects make
read-only, anonymous CVS servers available for anyone to download
the latest code — as long as that anyone uses CVS.”