At least two brilliant programmers, Linus Torvalds and Guido von Rossum, disparage the practice of putting keywords into a file that expand to show the version number, last author, etc.

I know how keyword differences clutter up diffs. One of the reasons I like SlickEdit's DiffZilla is because it can be set to skip leading comments.

However, I have vivid memories of team-programming where we had four versions of a file (two different releases, a customer one-off, and the development version) all open for patching at the same time, and was quite helpful to verify with a glance that each time we navigated to an included header we got the proper one, and each time we pasted code the source and destination were what we expected.

There is also the where-did-this-file-come-from problem that arises when a hasty developer copies a file from one place to another using the file system, rather than checking it out of the repository using the tool; or, more defensibly, when files under control in locations A, B, and C need to be marshalled (with cherry-picking) into a distribution location D.

In places where VCS keywords are banned, how do you cope?