2017-03-27 The most important value of a version control system for a long- living few-developers project, is archiving knowledge. The worst situation is a one-person project without a version control history that should be taken over by someone else. Good comments in the code (and a clean code base) do help, but not nearly as much as a VCS history with good changeset comments. Thus, take time to write good commit messages! Write as much as is necessary. Write pages, if it feels necessary. Just be sure to write about reasons and decisions, about intentions and alterna- tives. Often, if you have nothing else, it is already helpful to know the age of some code, thus consult backups if there is no VCS. Or grep mailing list archives or mailboxes if any such is available. (You can't imagine how much effort one is willing to take for just a tiny bit of understanding, because understanding is the basis of all refactoring and further development.) For improving your commit messages, there is nothing as enlight- ing than working with old foreign code that lacks good commit messages. At once, you'll be happy to invest ten times as much time into writing your own commit messages. (And this is not only for future developers but also for yourself. Slow down! ... and your work will improve.) http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke