Version Control

[Nibbles]

Git is the most amazing thing I think have ever used. What is more brilliant is Linus himself who designed the thing for the Linux kernel in just two weeks (and released the next version of the kernel a little more then a month after). It can be a bit tricky learning Git, it doesn't use many of the same names for common operations that other revision control systems do, and there are many habits you have to break and get into, mostly due to the amazing branching and merging it can do. Decentralized is a great feature for teams, you don't have to be connected to anything to make a commit, because you are your own branch, you just commit locally and push to a public repo when you can (though setting up a system can be hard to figure out, it isn't made exactly clear). Not to mention, fast fast fast like switching to apt-get after using emerge all your life (Gentoo users will get the joke), even transferring history over a network, it can often compress and store the entire history smaller then a single SVN checkout. Git can import and export SVN too, but that isn't as great, nonetheless it works (Linux versions at least). I can track a line of code as it moved through multiple files, I love that. For additional convincing, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 for an overview by Linus and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhZ9BXQgc4 for a more technical look into how it is used.

The really expensive versions of LabView natively support many different types of revision control systems (it ties into Microsoft Visual Studio somehow) to support graphical equivalents of diffs and conflict resolution, but it (I am pretty sure?) doesn't come with the kit. Git is pretty good with merges, though I am not sure how well it will handle VI's (they appear to be binary files, I have never had a conflict in a binary file to resolve, but I can't imagine it would be painful to do). Additionally, if I understand correctly, LabView can save to a new file for each change you make, and tag it with your name and a date and such, but that could get really big really fast.