Version Control comments

When working on large, multi-group projects I’ve found that it often helps to have information about the ‘version’ of an asset written into the source file (HTML, JSP, PHP, CSS, JS, or other ‘text’ formats).

This is easily accomplished with most version control packages and is done automatically if the following are added inside of an appropriate comment section in the file. The below examples are Java based, but can be easily adopted to any file type.

This is especially helpful when reviewing JavaDoc, and crucial for deployed text files such as CSS and JS as it makes debugging them much easier.

These work with CVS, Subversion, Serena Changeman DS, MKS Source Integrity and a variety of other products.

Raw Source:

/*
$Id: $
$Author: $
$Revision: $
$Date: $

<pre>
$Log: $
</pre>
*/

At check-in becomes:

/*
$Id: project.readme 1.1 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT Scott dev $
$Author: Scott $
$Revision: 1.1 $
$Date: 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT $

<pre>
$Log: project.readme $
Revision 1.1 2007/07/30 10:42:39CDT Scott
Scott. test
</pre>
*/

Cheers!

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