Introduction to version control

Overview

In the following, we provide an overview about the main features of the version control system Git.

Tips for instructors

• The goal is to motivate the usage of version control systems on the basis of the forth and back of a typical document review process.
• Please sum up the main concepts and features such as commit, repository and version history at the end.

“Final”.doc?

Please consider the following example review process:

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

Quite often such a review process results in a number of similar files with inconspicuous changes. In addition, it is hard to figure out the recent version manually. In such scenarios, tools such as Git can be quite helpful.

Key points

• Git keeps track of file changes. You are able to decide which of these changes make the next file version. A record of these changes is called a commit. These commits automatically include useful metadata (e.g., author, date and time of the change etc.).
• Git allows you to organize related files in a repository (e.g., code and documentation of a software, a paper, …) including their history of changes and related metadata.
• Repositories can be kept in sync across different computers and support collaboration among different people.