Introduction

Estimated time: 12 minutes

Overview

Questions

• What are the goals of this course?

Objectives

• To understand the learning outcomees of this course
• To understand the structure of the practicals

What is Version Control?

Any means by which you track changes to something:

Is this effective version control?

What is Version Control?

• Structured way of keeping track of changes to files
• Implemented in different "version control systems" (VCS)
• Typically share the concept of a history, the changes which make up the history , and the ability to move freely back and forth within the history
• The most popular VCS is git , which we will be focusing on today

Why Version Control?

• Keeps a labelled history of all changes made to a project, and lets you rewind them if something goes wrong
• Lets you experiment with changes to a project whilst keeping stable versions of the project untouched
• Provides lots of convenience features for working with other people on a project
• Can act as a backup of your projects, especially when using a hosted service like GitHub
• Many tools (like IDEs) have git integrations

What is git?

• A specific version control system, created by the guy who created the Linux kernel (the myth goes that he named it by his personal reputation)
• A "distributed" version control system - many people can have copies of the stuff under version control and they don’t need to all be in sync
• One of the most important programming tools you can benefit from becoming comfortable with

What is GitHub?

• A service for hosting, organising, and collaborating on projects that are under version control

• Other git services are available

• Provides a consistent way to store and share version-controlled projects
• Can act as a portfolio of sorts
• Has a whole host of other features (project management, continuous integration, etc.)
• See the PlasmaFAIR GitHub organisation for an example

Git Glossary: Basics

• Repository (repo) : a project under version control
• History : timeline of changes to your repo
• Clone : make a local copy of a repo, including its history
• Commit : a labelled set of specific change to files in your repo
• Push / pull : synchronise history with another copy of your repo
• Working tree : the current state of your project and files on disk
• Track : keep under version control