12.12. Using VC Effectively

We urge those of you with prior version control experience to heed the following maxim: to use VC effectively, check in your changes early and often! Of course, when you are working as part of a team of developers, you do need to take care to check in only a consistent and working set of files each time. There's nothing quite equal to the frustration of discovering that you can no longer compile and test your own code because someone else has checked in a fragmentary or broken piece of theirs.

If you're used to version control interfaces that are as clumsy and difficult as bare SCCS, RCS, or—to a lesser extent—CVS, your reflexes may prevent you from getting the most leverage out of VC. You probably won't commit often; you're not used to being able to instantly get status reports on a whole subtree of files.

It's worth a little thought and effort to reeducate yourself. You'll find that, instead of being an irritating minor chore, version control under VC can be tremendously liberating. By checking changes in often, you'll find you can afford to experiment more, because you'll know how to revert to a known good state quickly if need be.