Not to have a VCS war here but...
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Originally Posted by MamaSpoldi
I can view the files on any computer
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When checked out at rest on a computer, all the files are there just like SVN and can be seen without special tools. I can copy directories too if I wanted to, but don't need to.
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... and we have an automatic backup if something should happen to our programming laptop.
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We do one better -- since git's local repo is a complete copy of the repository + history, each repo on each student's computer has complete history, and the flash drive does too. And development at the competition is almost exactly how we do development at home -- just pushing to a flash drive instead of to github.
Also, I can use git diff to figure out exactly what changes were made.
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This gives us the ability to quickly recreate our environment and software on another system if it becomes necessary. And I don't need specialized tools to access the files.
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Well, if you had a completely raw system with no development tools on it, you would need to install Eclipse+compile tools or LabView. So from that perspective, it's just an extra piece of software you need to have installed. So we're still even.
To answer the original OP's question: At the end of the day, one needs to have a process that works for your team so you can do development at home and at the competition. For teams using text-based languages and more than one team member -- there are a lot of different ways to do it -- but use a version control system of some kind, and don't try to roll your own. There are a lot of opinions on which one is best -- but there's a good reason why distributed VCS such as git and mercurial have been hugely popular since their introduction.