Many projects are good at version controlling the main source code of their applications but become rather lax when it comes to other files. They may have HTML files, CSS files, configuration files or shell scripts that help them manage the system. These files are frequently not version controlled and may have different versions on different systems. You really need to version control these files along with the rest of the code. They are difficult enough for one person to keep track of but when you have a team of people, it's almost impossible to manage. You need to have a way to start with only the base development environment and the version control library and re-building the entire development and deployment environments from scratch. If there's any doubt about the correct version of a file to use, the answer should be that it's the one that's in the version control system, not the one that happens to be sitting on the file system.Download