Pervasive Versioning

Recently Apple announced the Time Machine, which is the ability to go back in time and see all the alterations to your files, including finding deleted files. For some of us intense geeks, this is not a new feature. Like others, I put my entire working directory under version control, originally CVS now Subversion, and have thus had the ability to easily look at all the changes to everything I work on. It's such a useful feature that I've wondered before about what it would be like to have MoreVersionControl, and perhaps Time Machine is a step in that direction.

Time Machine is seen as an automated backup system, so it doesn't seem to support the notion of thoughtful commits that a versioning system has. I think this is the best way to go, at least initially, so that people get used to the idea of this sort of system. The time-based browser looks interesting, versioning systems need some rethinking of user-interface - and who better than Apple to do this?

I think the more important step is that making this capability more widely available will give a kick to application developers. In MoreVersionControl I said that not enough applications know how to diff and merge. Perhaps Time Machine will start getting people to think about that and start building these capabilities into applications, this would make versioning much more handy.

Versioning is handy on a single desktop, but as anyone who has used it knows, the real benefit is in collaboration. Software projects see an enormous benefit from using a version control system as a collaboration tool. Other efforts can as well - presentations, white papers, excel models can all benefit for versioned collaboration tools. (Again the lack of intelligent diff and merge is a big barrier to this.) Even lonely me benefits hugely with my MultipleDesktops.

So my hope that is that Time Machine will spur development of applications that are aware of versioning and can take advantage of it, which will in turn shift to more effective collaboration. But in any case, I'd strongly urge you to try doing it now. Subversion is free and easy to set up, and even though applications don't diff and merge well there are worthwhile benefits in collaborating with others using a shared versioned repository. It's much better than keeping track of emailed documents or using an unversioned shared drive.