What is the purpose of Version control in a software?

What is the purpose of Version control in a software.? Why do we need a version control and what are the advantages of it..
Thanks in Advance

Re: Version control

Version control is not just for software, but can be applied to any developing system such as schematics or pcb layouts.
If you have been involved in software development you will know of the cycle of releases, bug fixes, added features, variants etc. Version control allows you to just maintain one working directory and keeps a log of the stages of development. You can go back to any stage exactly as it was at any time. You can also have team development and branches, tag releases. It is quite a large subject difficult to explain the advantages in a few words. No proffesional software shold be written without strict version control in place.
A very good and popular version control system is 'SubVersion' which is open source and a free download. If you use it with 'Tortoise', makes it very easy to manage.

Re: Version control

At a corporation I worked some times ago, they used the following criteria :

Version AAA.BBB-CCC

were :

AAA means hardware compatible project
BBB means firmware compatible project
CCC means revision number

It is very useful you know just looking the number of board and number of program if are compatibles between itself. For example, a board named NMS230.XX accept at it microcontroler just firmwares with prefix 230. Revisions numbers have to be at same prefix, due it is hardware and firmware compatible.


There are several other ways to acchieve version control. It is just one.

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Re: Version control

Hi,

Version control is an attempt to formulate the actual research process when complex software designs, or 'architectures' are being developed. This is done as a necessary first step towards a strengthening of the research methodology, so that the results from future research of this kind can be more precise, better validated and more reliable.


Regards

Ramesh

Version control

Is there any EDA package tool which contains version control with the package??
If there is ,do they have version comparison feature too?

Re: Version control

smith_suez said:

Is there any EDA package tool which contains version control with the package??
If there is ,do they have version comparison feature too?

Click to expand...

Altium Designer 6 has built in version control capability that is designed to work with free version control software available on the web. You can read about it in **broken link removed** .

The supported version control systems include Subversion (SVN), Concurrent Versions System (CVS) and other version control systems that support the Microsoft® standard SCC Interface.

You can download free SVN software that will work with Altium Desinger at **broken link removed** . You can download free CVS software at
https://www.nongnu.org/cvs/ . A Google search will reveal other similar software that can be used, but those are the most popular packages.

You can compare schematics, netlists, or PCB files using the built in features called "Show Differences" and "Show Physical Differences". It's explained in the PDF document referenced in the first paragraph above, and in more detail in other help documents provided with Altium Designer.

Version control

Thank you everyone.