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[bateleur]

You severely underestimate the utility and flexibility of version control.

No, you just severely overestimate my self-discipline!

I wasn't trying to say that there was no way a version control system could handle this sort of situation, I was pointing out that in practice using a version control system causes me to make chickens too seldom.

I tried to word my post in such a way as not to sound like advocacy. Version control is indeed a good thing.

[mcc]

I use svn because I'm used to it and it's preinstalled on OS X.

I should probably be using git because I'm basically the test case for why git should exist (I do a lot of development on the train, with no internet access-- I wind up doing pathological things like writing little scripts to copy all hits on `svn status | grep M` into a folder so I can do some basic version management without access to the version control system). However my limited experience with git is that it is unnecessarily complicated, and I'm not 100% familiar with how to use it whereas I'm very familiar with managing svn and its quirks, so I've been reluctant to switch over. However apparently we're switching to git soon at work, so I guess I'll be learning git soon one way or the other.

Something I've been very curious about is "svn-git", which is apparently a simple bridge type thing that lets you use git locally, and then push the state of your local git repository over to an svn master server whenever it's ready. It seems like that would make administration easy, and address one of my big complaints with git (the lack of a canonical 'revision number'-- apparently you're supposed to keep track of different versions using a 32-digit hash value or something?).

[BorisTheBrave]

git-svn works well, but if you try and take advantage of git for more advanced actions (e.g. use it to merge branches), the correspondence breaks down without even more git hackyery.

But the hashes thing isn't as bad as you make it. It's not like tags and branches don't exist (they do, and work better than SVN's fake ones using directories). After that, why do you care that it's in hex rather than decimal?
What you are really complaining about is how complicated history can get when it's not forced to be strictly sequential. Well, that's true, I spend more time making sure my history is clean. But it's time made up when you make use of that history.

[pelle]

Cvs for a few years, then svn, now git. Each switch was painful, but worth it. I love how the command-line tools in git are so useful, not likw svn that you almost musr hide behind scripts or gui to work well with.

[zacaj]

I made a script that runs in the background and every few minutes checks if any files in my working folder have been changed, and then if they have it makes a timestamped diff file, so I can go back to any save ive ever made.

[slembcke]

I still use subversion. I really wanted to like git, but it just doesn't seem really any better to me. The subversion CLI tools are just way easier to use with a few exceptions. Local commits and easier branching are nice, but just weren't killer features for me.

[Nix]

I made a script that runs in the background and every few minutes checks if any files in my working folder have been changed, and then if they have it makes a timestamped diff file, so I can go back to any save ive ever made.

So basically you made a rudimentary version control system yourself. Is there any reason you don't use one that is readily available, like git or svn? It would certainly make reverting changes much easier, and your system has nothing for branching, or even (I assume) commit descriptions.

[zacaj]

I dont see how it makes reverting easer, and a version control system is just one more thing for me to forget to use.

[jmp]

I dont see how it makes reverting easer

“hg revert”  (Or if you want to revert to a specific revision, “hg revert -r REVISION”.)

It’s that simple in Mercurial.

[zacaj]

Yeah, and I can just type "vcs -r PICK A DATE" and it will list the ones that day, and I just choose a number