Workshop 22nd March 2013 2 p.m. Nuffield Theatre, Lecture Theatre A (6/1077)
Version control for complete beginners, using Git
Jessica Jones
University of Southampton
- Categories
- e-Research, Git, Linux, Scientific Computing, Software Engineering
- Submitter
- Jess Jones
Have you ever had to work on something with someone else? Been nervous making changes to something in case you messed it up and couldn't undo it?
Do you find your home directory is cluttered with several copies of the same file, made at different times, perhaps with a date in the name or some other reminder?
Do you ever need to re-run programs you wrote over a year ago to reproduce results?
Ever wondered when that bug you spent ages tracking down got introduced into the code? Or who wrote a particular bit of a program or document and why?
If so, then you need version control!
Content
This course aims to introduce the basic concepts of version control and how it is useful in the real world. We then look at Git, a popular distributed version control system pioneered by Linus Torvalds (who named it after himself).
When you leave, we hope that you will be happy knowing that you can clone, merge, commit, push and pull, with that warm fuzzy glow that comes with knowing that your change history is preserved and you can zip back and forth through time (within the version control tree) as and when you feel like it.
Prerequisites
A basic familiarity with the Linux command line will be assumed. If you are already using Lyceum or Iridis, then this should pose no problem for you.