Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
This is useful for documentation and quality assurance but also extremely helpful in the worse-case scenario where new code breaks functionality and has to be scrapped – it becomes a no-brainer to completely undo changes and revert back to a known, good state.
If you would like to contribute to an open source project, you will need to become conversant with the source control system in place – you won’t be able to submit any modified code without using it. This is an excellent discipline and practice for successful software projects, and without it much open source software would have a hard time keeping itself organised especially with developers working all around the world.
But, even if you are not interested in actual programming, there is still a lot of value in understanding source code control because it’s THE guaranteed way to always get the bleeding edge version of any app you are keenly following.
Software releases generally occur at specific milestones, where a reasonable amount of extra functionality has been added or bug fixes have taken place. Only in exceptional circumstances, like an emergency security patch, does a new release come out hot on the heels of another.
For many users, this is fine enough; you get to maintain a stable system with just periodic updates. However, you might be mad keen on a crucial app. You might be desperately waiting for an anticipated new feature. You might have a mix of software which doesn’t work together and you anxiously want the patch.
For power users, or at least the mad obsessive, mastering the VCS is also for you. You can pull down the absolute latest version of all the source code files for a project on demand, compiling it on your system, and putting it in place.
There are two major source control systems in the FOSS sphere. The first, CVS, is well-known and established but the second, Subversion, is gaining in popularity and is used by such well-established projects as WordPress. Popular source code repository, SourceForge, provides supports for both.
I’ll focus on Subversion here because, as good as CVS is, Subversion is better. Subversion is based on CVS and improves upon it; they’re not two radically different systems but instead one which works largely the same as the other but does more.
One example is folders; CVS will version files but not directories. By contrast, Subversion will version directories, copies and renames.
Subversion – or SVN as it is regularly known – has two parts – a server and a client. The server is web-based and is hosted on a central machine with a dedicated database known as its repository. The client component is used by all the people wanting to work with repositories, whatever their purpose may be.
I won’t talk about the server because while essential it’s not something people will be setting up too often. If you make a new project on SourceForge, the SVN server is already provided for you. However, if you do make your own FOSS project on your own system then this Lifehacker article may help.
David Bass
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