BecauseRobots

Source control isn’t exactly a popular, every day phrase outside of software development. At the root of source control, there are really three goals:

• back ups
• collaboration
• publishing

Now, none of those are particularly unique, and source control is hardly a waste of resources if it is only being used for two of those above. In some sense, the ’spirit’ of source control is being builtin to other things. Google Docs stores full document revision history and allows for collaboration and publishing. Wikipedia and other wiki store full page revision history, allows for collaboration and is published.

Nevertheless, its worth knowing the widely adopted solutions. Subversion is one of two major, free source control software packages out and about. (The other being git, which is designed, in my opinion, for much larger groups of people and more advanced collaboration.) There’s lots of free subversion sites where you can snag a repository at least up to some size. Whether you need to back up revisions of your book, want to have a shared directory of family photos across computers across the country, or simply want to keep your home directories in sync, subversion can do it for you. See Subversion on subversion.tigris.org.

Tags: linux, subversion