Version Control

Jordan Walker

February 19, 2015

Concepts covered

  • Anatomy of a VCS
  • General Concepts
  • Centralized vs. Distributed
  • GitHub and policies

Disclaimer

I'm primarily a Git user

My views and opinions are my own, not to be confused with official policy

YMMV

Anatomy of a Version Control System

Trunk

Branches

Tags

HEAD

By Museo de Almeria (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Terms/Jargon

  • SCM
  • commit
  • diff
  • merge
  • conflict
  • revision
  • repository

What version control isn't

Then what is it for?

  • Source
  • Tests
  • Documentation
  • Build Materials
  • Other Resources

Centralized vs. Distributed Version Control

Centralized

  • Traditional version control systems (CVS, Subversion, etc.)
  • Repository is on server, clients perform commands (commit, checkout, update) directly against server
  • Only trusted people may commit, on one authoritative source tree
  • Locks are available to ensure that only one user is working on a file at a time

Distributed

  • Newer model of version control systems (Git, Mercurial, etc.)
  • Repositories are "cloned" and commits are exchanged between repos
  • Organization structure determines importance of specific repositories
  • Commits can be made remotely and reviewed to add to canonical repo

The story of Git

GitHub

GitHub brought a social element to SCM. This brought about the popularity of Git.

Tips and tricks

  • Commit early and often
  • Avoid long running branches/merge often
  • Establish common workflows
  • Tag anything that resembles a release
  • Don't commit anything you'd want back

USGS Resources

More Resources

Hello World!


mkdir my-repo
cd my-repo
cat "Hello World!" < file.txt
git init
git add file.txt
git commit -m "Initial Commit"

And it's hosted


git remote add origin git@github.com:jiwalker-usgs/demo.git
git push origin master

Thank You

Questions?