Distributing your work to your team #section7 Seeing what’s changed is stunningly useful for diagnosing any issues you’ve inadvertently created, as you’ve narrowed the problem down to a very specific subset of the total project. You’ve got a complete record of all the important changes to your files right there at your fingertips, so you can very easily “diff” your (broken) working copy against the (functional) previous version to see exactly what lines of code you changed. Subversion can’t tell you whether your code works, but it can be a handy resource if you find that your code doesn’t work, or worse, breaks something that worked yesterday. That said, Subversion does facilitate experimentation and creative freedom, as you’ve always got a “safe” copy to revert to if your experiment fails miserably. Much like the homework-doing robots I always dreamed of as a child, the coding-for-you revision control system is still a couple of years off. Once I’ve updated my working copy, I know that I’ve got all the important changes up till now, and I can start working without fear of accidentally overwriting someone else’s work. If any of my files are out of date (or have been accidentally deleted), they’re automatically brought into line with the latest and greatest. It compares my working copy with the latest revision of the project in the repository. When I’m ready to start working, I first ask Subversion to make sure that all my files are up to date (as you might expect, Subversion calls this process an update). By managing your project within a repository, you can keep track of all the important changes to all the files you’re interested in. Subversion solves this problem by creating a centralized storage location, called a repository, that acts as the team’s shared source for project data. The unbelievably widespread practice of e-mailing zip files around is marginally effective, but it’s an inefficient, cumbersome, and error-prone workaround. Inevitably, you’ll overwrite someone else’s work, or they’ll overwrite yours. Other people are working just as hard as you are, and their changes are eventually going to overlap with something you’re about to start playing with. In a team environment, it’s dangerous to work with project files that have been sitting on your computer for a while. You were presumably doing all of these things already.
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