Section 4.8. Wider Uses of SCM

4.8. Wider Uses of SCM

Most of this chapter has been about using SCM tools to control the source code for a product. To have confidence that you can repeat previous releases, you need to control much more than just the source code. Parts of the development environment to consider include all the tools used in the build process, the operating system as configured on the build machine, the test environment and the target operating systems, documentation, and finally how the SCM tool itself was configured at the time of the build. If all that sounds like too much load for your SCM tool, then at least create backups of the various tools and machines and store them somewhere safe off site.

One great use for SCM in your development environment is for people's personal machines, where the data is perhaps not backed up in any other way. On Unix machines, keeping a copy of each person's /etc directory and all the dotfiles from the home directory provides easy recovery when a disk fails. On Windows, a copy of each person's My Documents directory will let you recover key files at some point.