Version control

Objectives

  • Understand motivation/purpose of version control.
  • Set up git on their own machines.
  • Be able to use git for basic history, commits and branches.

Plan

  • Have a discussion referring to two aspects of the life cycle of a research project:
    • It’s change over time: history.
    • Working on various things at the same time (with potentially more than one person): parallel workflow.
  • Draw picture of this life cycle using examples from prime factorisation done in previous chapter.
  • Ask: what problems can occur? (including not know what happened at a given stage)
  • Ask: what do individuals currently do to work around this? Expect people to talk about dropbox having versions, naming files with suffixes, copying work from collaborators. Discuss possible drawback to this. See https://twitter.com/dingding_peng/status/996638982166413312
  • Explain that this chapter will concentrate on the first of these two aspects but will begin to touch on the second. And the goal will be to remove possibility for human error as much as possible.
  • Setup: ensure email and name is set.
  • Demonstrate init: explain that this corresponds to telling git to start paying attention.
  • Demonstrate staging and committing. The important of a commit message being able to know what any given stage was.
  • Tracking changes: might need to discuss that tediousness of writing a commit message is offset by benefit. Also, discuss when to commit.
  • Show gitignore: explain that that can be changed over time.
  • Show how to see the history. Using git log then discuss how we can now solve one of the identified problems which is to recover a file using git checkout.
  • Now demonstrate the ability to do work in parallel using branches.
  • Demonstrate merging. Mention merge conflicts.
  • Summarise and discuss tips.

FAQ