git

A couple of very good and interesting posts covering Distributed Version Control and version control thoughts in general. Both have some very good discussion and the comments are well worth a read.

The Risks of Distributed Version Control - Discusses a potential "community" problem with distributed version control systems (such as git, mercurial, etc.) where people "go away", work on something by themselves and then return with a huge mass of code. Not a technical/tool problem, but a group dynamics issue.

There is a sub-group of version control users (a growing group, I believe) that manage their entire home directory in a version control system. There are several arguments for this use, and I have played with it off and on, but never really "moved in" all the way. I'm probably getting closer to the day.

Other people use version control for their /etc directory on Linux boxes. /etc holds much of the common configuration files on many Unix based distributions, and being able to "go back" to a previous configuration can be really handy.

If you are looking for a well written "how-to" type document on Git, make sure and check out the Git Magic site. Well written and geared toward someone who is familiar with version control but not necessarily git, I found it a very useful read.

If you haven't used version control software before, you should try it. It's not just for software development any more. As an example, I keep my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles in version control Then I can pull and push them from other machines, keeping things in sync with "home" whenever I want. Since it's versioned, if something gets corrupted or some new plugin causes a problem, I can just revert. It has worked very well.