Didn't Joel write an article about that sometime ago? Ah, here it is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar

Didn't Joel write an article about that sometime ago? Ah, here it is: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000332.html The point of it is, use it yourself. If you use subversion or whatever else (seems you are familiar with subversion so go ahead and use that) then you can roll back changes, you can do diffs, you have a full copy of the source with revisions, and you can always tell rsync to ignore the .svn directories when you copy things over to production. Eventually something will break, and you will be the guy/girl with the magical powers to bring it back to a non-broken version and find what has changed. Eventually, it will trickle to the rest of the team that it's not a bad idea. Version control can be incrementally adopted. Just sneakily do a commit after other people's changes, and show people how it works. If not everyone adopts it, fine. There is certainly a strategy that's necessary to make sure you don't step on each other's toes while editing things. Use that to mediate between the source control crowd and the non-source-control crowd. Forcing it on others is likely to be counterproductive. Start using it yourself and let others see what happens.