why fix what isn't broken in this regard?
Because version control is framestepping for software development.
You won't know why it's essential unless you have seen it work well
1. Why should people use convenient, efficient engines like NL or Lix, when they can play L1? Why should the USA switch to metric, even though they have archaic units to measure everything?
git is an extremely lightweight, powerful,
local content tracker. For normal development, there is no server involved. Removing git-tracking from a project is equal to deleting a single
.git dir inside the project root dir.
Local branching, merging, and reverting are the main points. They're akin to framestepping with possibility to insert or reorder.
Lix on github is 40 MB, complete with 4.5 years of history. If you clone this, you get a full-fledged local copy of the repository. You get side branches that I chose to make public, right now 1 out of maybe 20 local branches, for physics discussion with geoo. From the 40 MB of data, you get to build any version back to March 2011, complete with levels and graphics.
and ultimately has no effect on the end code
It has an effect, because people are encouraged to help.
I don't care much if you hack NL using Windows Notepad, or some fancier editor. I'm not affected by your editor choice. I
do care whether you publish source using version control, or in a plain archive. It's harder to talk about changes, and to make patches, which git could transparently merge in. It will record what happened when and why, so if you've merged crap, it's always possible to revert precisely.
Even if you never get a patch, it's convenient for others to follow your thoughts, and easier to look at what's new.
Similarly, it's convenient for me that geoo maintains the
community levelpack on github. I can pull from him whenever I want to release the main game, and
suggest patches for him to merge automatically.
These are the benefits from publishing git history. The even more important thing remains the local control.
6 Myths Preventing Developers from Using Git -- the first being "I back up regularly, so I don't need source control".
-- Simon
[1] About source control working well: I've never liked centralized version control like SVN, where you either push your buggy code to a server as soon as you're done writing it, or can't commit for days. Committing should be different from inflicting changes on the world. When I was doing a SVN-managed university project 6 or 7 years ago, my policy was: Nobody but me works between 2 a.m. and 7 a.m.