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Version Control

Version Control. What does version control mean?. A version control system is a software tool designed to help keep track of changes made to files A version control system tracks the history of your files A version control system helps you collaborate on changes

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Version Control

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  1. Version Control

  2. What does version control mean? • A version control system is a software tool designed to help keep track of changes made to files • A version control system tracks the historyof your files • A version control system helps you collaborate on changes • These two qualities make them really useful, as we'll see • Popular systems include Subversion, git, and Mercurial • They have their differences, but much in common too

  3. Keeping track of history • You're working on software to process experimental data for publication. • You find to your horror that a change you made yesterday has rendered all the values for a particular result gibberish. How do you get the previous day's code back? • It turns out the previous version is also broken! You must have broken it during the last fortnight, but you don't know when. How can you find out what went wrong? • Someone asks for a copy of the software used for that Institute of Scientists journal paper last May. It's changed a lot since then! What do you say?

  4. Collaborating on changes • You're the only one working on your code, but you need to run it both on your laptop at home and the server in the lab... • How do you make sure the code is the same on both? • You're working on code or a paper with a colleague... • How do you find out when they change something? • You both make fixes in the same file. How do you merge them without risking losing work? • How can you find out which of you introduced a bug, and when?

  5. Version control helps with this • A version control system helps with all of those problems • You do have to work a bit: • You need to tell it which files you care about • You need to tell it when you've changed something • If two people make conflicting changes, you have to resolve them • ... but it's much easier than trying to do this by hand

  6. Version control terminology • A repository holds the complete history of your project: every version of every file • A working copy is the project as you're working on it now: just the current version of each file • You can update your working copy, replacing its files with newer (or older!) versions from the repository • A repository can be local, on your computer's hard disc, or remote, on a server somewhere else • You can push or pull between repositories of the same project, to keep their changes in sync

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