No. Whenever I go on a tangent, I just make a copy.
I do AI, maybe that's the difference. Honestly, apart from utils.lisp, I wouldn't cry much if I suddenly lost all my files. Code is trivial, the important point is in the experience / insights.
I'll try it some day for sure. It's just not that appealing. It was the same with Emacs.
If you find your self with directories like "v1" "oldv1" "updateD!!!" you need version control :). Subversion has GUI clients integrated into file explorers so you don't even notice the overhead.
I wrote more about it here, if you'd like convincing:
It's not. I spent a week setting up and learning to checkout, update, add files, and commit. The only workflow change is an occasional trip to the shell to commit, but this is usually at the very tail of a session where it doesn't break flow anyway.
Then (if you put in on a public server, of course) your work is accessible from anywhere. Run into a friend at Starbucks and want to show him the module you wrote today? Just get into the shell and checkout your repository.
Not only that, it's a perfect record of your project. Occasionally I need to assess the status of the project vis-a-vis some point in the past (for myself when strategizing, for my boss when he needs a report, etc). Being able to look at the commit logs saves time and produces better reports (commit logs don't forget).
So even if you use only the most basic features, you still get an immense benefit from using a VCS. And the hours it's saved me in trivial tasks made it well worth the week it took to hammer down.
I have this feeling too. However, I've just started using git, and one nice thing is the sense of closure when you "commit" something, it's a milestone, a bit like a release. It's also nice to have a log of changes, with a short comment about each one.
But I haven't had any actual advantage from it so far; and any nervousness about playing around with files has shifted across to nervousness about playing around with the repository (I had to delete it and start again a couple of times). Actually, I find doing anything to the repository (reverting, branching etc) terrifying, because I don't really understand what it's going to do, and I could lose everything. If only there was a way to back it all up first... ;-) I'd rather just get on with my actual tasks! Just my experience - so far.
And I like how bzr is willing to act like svn on demand. Setting up a shared repository is easy, other users can pretend they're using a centralized VCS as long as they need to, and when you eventually encounter a situation where distributed development would work better, not much really needs to change -- it's version control with no regrets.
I imagine learning git would probably be much easier if you were already familiar with bzr, since you'd already have a point of reference for most of the operations. The same way C is easier to structure if you already know a higher-level language like Python -- the abstract concepts are already familiar, so it's just a matter of translating them to another language, rather than figuring it all out from scratch in a pricklier environment.
" I find doing anything to the repository (reverting, branching etc) terrifying, because I don't really understand what it's going to do, and I could lose everything."
Like many things in the software world, the more you know, the better off you are!
