About Version Control

Source: wikipedia.org

Revision Control (also known as version control (system) (VCS), source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information. It is most commonly used in engineering and software development to manage ongoing development of digital documents like application source code, art resources such as blueprints or electronic models, and other critical information that may be worked on by a team of people. Changes to these documents are usually identified by incrementing an associated number or letter code, termed the “revision number”, “revision level”, or simply “revision” and associated historically with the person making the change. A simple form of revision control, for example, has the initial issue of a drawing assigned the revision number “1″. When the first change is made, the revision number is incremented to “2″ and so on.

Some Version Control systems
I’ve only mentioned the most popular ones I’ve seen during my career, but I know there’s tons of commercial revision control systems that are supposed to be great, however, these ones do the job, are free, and lots of developers know how to use them.

My favorite one is subversion (having used CVS) in the past.

Here are links to all these projects:

• CVS
• Subversion
• Git (Linus Torvalds uses this one to develop the Linux Kernel, and he’s part of the Git project aswell)
• Mercurial (Found about this one today when I saw FriendFeed.com uses it)
• Bazaar-VCS (See who is using it)