How do you manage versions? [closed]

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I am a self-trained programmer (analytical chemist by training, now more akin to a bioinformatician and computational biologist). My code alternates between one-off work that may not be used more than a handful of times, to code that is constantly building on top of itself or other modules I have written. I am the only one working on this code, but I work on it from many locations. For this reason, I use dropbox to keep all of my projects synced. Problem is that currently when I make major changes to a file, I either make notes within the file and comment out the old section or simply add a counter to the file name (v1, v2, etc). This gets messy both within my code and within my directory.

I realized this is not the most effective way to keep track of versions, but when it is just me, it is very quick for me to move between files, debugging or improving, and in the event I need to go back a version, either the 'previous versions' within Windows works, or Dropbox keeps versions. This is opposed to having to commit, pull, branch, etc. with something like Git-hub.

Can anyone recommend a better workflow, again, for a single person to keep track of code? Instead of keeping all the v1, v2, etc, it would be nice to have a record of them somewhere, easy comparisons to see changes, and the ability to use them if needed.

Answer 1

I'd really recommend you to start using a distributed version control system (DVCS), such as Git or Mercurial.

You wouldn't need to stop using Dropbox, but rather turn your shared code folder into a repository that allows you to frequently commit any changes that matter.

If you ever need to collaborate, you can look into hosting solutions like Github or Bitbucket, but you could just as easily share your Dropbox folder with other collaborators.

This way you would get a relatively simple yet powerful workflow.