Every so often, I come across a pro­gram­mer (usu­ally a stu­dent, or a self-taught hob­by­ist) who doesn’t use ver­sion con­trol (cue shock and horror).

Of course, when­ever some­one dares to admit this, they’re set upon by every­one and heck­led and pestered until they give in and install some VCS. And then they spend a few after­noons moan­ing about how they “could have been cod­ing instead”.

And it occurred to me that there doesn’t seem to be any short, sim­ple, min­i­mal­ist guide to set­ting up and using a VCS sys­tem. There are plenty of excel­lent tuto­ri­als and guides which explain every­thing about every­thing, and are an amaz­ing resource to those will­ing to actu­ally spend time to learn how to use their tool.

But new­com­ers to ver­sion con­trol are gen­er­ally some­one who’s will­ing to give it 2 – 3 min­utes, if it’ll shut every­one else up so they can get back to cod­ing. They’re not inter­ested in know­ing what their code looked like 7 months ago, or what exact changes were com­mit­ted on the 28th of June 2010 at 9:37 pm. And they don’t really see why they’d want to branch and merge their code.

Thus… (more…)