How I learned to stop worrying and love revision software

Steve Crawford

South African Astronomical Observatory

Revision Control is the management of changes to a product.

So why does it matter to you?

Revision control can make your life better




Revision control can backup your work

It can help avoid the nightmare of having your laptop break, your computer stolen, or accidentally deleting all of your data.

Revision control can share your product

It can make it easy to share with collaborators around the globe or to work on the same project with someone right next door.

Revision control can manage your project

A way to track milestones, issues, bugs, and progress, but also ways to undue mistakes, pursue different ideas, and incorporate conflicting developments

Version Control Examples

Backing Up

  • Back Ups (Is IT backing up your harddrive?)
  • Dropbox
  • Google Drive
  • iCloud

Pros: Simple, easy to share
Cons: Might not monitor all changes, might be hard to recover

Built-in Software

  • Microsoft word (Track changes)
  • Google Docs (Track Changes and Sharing)
  • Wikis

Pros: Simple, easy to use
Cons: Software specifc, compatibility issues wih sharing

Client-Server Version Control

client server
Examples: cvs, subversion
Pros: Powerful
Cons: Complicated

Distributed Version Control

Examples: git, mercurial
Pros: Powerful, easier to use
Cons: Still complicated

Online Code hosting sites

Forking is not a bad word

(And other revision control jargon)

Life cycle of a Project

project visualization
Trunk: Main development line
Branch: Start a new line to develop on.
Commit: Save a version of your work
Merge: Join your branch back to the Trunk
Checkout: Create a local working copy
update: Merge changes from the trunk to a local working copy
Conflict: Changes are made by different users that cannot be merged until they are resolved
Tag: Snapshot in time. For example, a release
Fork: To create a branch

Examples of using Revision Software

Using Dropbox to share a paper

Simple, easy, and provides backup for the project

Using svn for research colloboration

We can share catalogs, code, paper text, and archive material

Using git+github for development

Sharing, commenting, reviewing of code, tracking progress, documentation, automatic builds, and writing papers

SAAO and Revision Software

Commonly used Revision Software

  • Subversion
  • git
  • github (user rich interface)
  • bitbucket (cheap private repos)

Projects using Revision Software

Revision Software can...

Save you time
Improve collaboration
Increase Productive
...and maybe even be a little fun

Willing to try the tutorial?
Want more resources?

Thank You