(I’m guessing that a lot of what I say here applies to all distributed version control systems, but since I’ve only used darcs, that is what I’ll focus on.)
One of the neatest things about darcs is the fact that every checked out copy is itself a repository. This is perfect for university courses! Students can check out the professor’s code, make their own changes to the code (i.e. if the code is the starting point for some assignment…quite common), and commit their changes to their own repository without ‘disconnecting’ it from the professor’s version. All the student needs to do is pull changes from the professors server periodically and deal with any conflicts that may arise. The student can even push their copy to a university server for backup. It’s perfect!
If only Google code had darcs support, then I could force my 271 students to do this. As it stands, I’m not so sure a data structures course is the ideal place to introduce version control, but I may end up doing this anyway.
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