Re: What CVS program do you use?
 

I was leaving our custom circuit code out of my consideration, since that's a feature not shared with too many other teams. Obviously we could not reuse code between 2003 and 2004. Just because there was one year where reuse was not feasible though does not change my original statement that we attempt to re-use as much as possible. Even though we didn't re-use code that year, however, we did make use of the old code while writing the new. We re-used many of the algorithms by just porting them from one language to the other.

This year will be another story (unless IFI surprises us with more changes!). Our entire autonomous navigation subsystem is reusable and largely independent of drive-train designs, as is a lot of our code that handles joystick inputs, etc. I would think this would be the case for most teams. Even if other teams did not start with as modular a design as we did I'd still think they'd start with previous year's code to work from when writing for a new robot. So in that regard I still say that our robot software has more than just a very limited lifetime.

Anyway, clearly what you have works for you and what we have works for us, and that's all that matters. Hopefully other teams reading this thread will be able to understand some of the options for source-code management and get a feel for the advantages and disadvantages of each.
I knew what you meant ;). Our primary robot software (the stuff running on the Robot Controller only) is ~45 files and around 8000 lines of code (and that is not counting the stuff from Microchip or IFI), so even with just that one project we find version control useful.