Version Control

Description

Version control is used to manage multiple versions of a number files during a project. A version control system provides two primary data management capabilities. It allows users to lock files so they can only be edited by one person at a time, or track changes to files made by various persons at the same time.

Motivation

If you are the only author of a file then there is very little reason to implement version control. If, however, you are collaborating with other individuals it becomes important to keep track of each persons contribution. More importantly if two people are working on the same file we must ensure that the work done by one person is not overwritten by that of the other when both parties save their modifications.

In such cases version control may be used to manage this. Version control may take either of the following strategies to do this

• The first method allows one person to lock the file while they edit it, preventing anyone else from editing it.
• The second method allows everyone to edit a copy of the file individually and then later combine all these efforts in an intelligent manner.

Wikipedia offers the following comparison between the various systems. On Campus we use mostly use Git, a good argument fo it is to be found at Stackoverflow

Git

We store all our repositories on GitHub, please create an account. After creating an account you will want to create a repository, this is a little less straight forward and depends on which operating system you are using

Windows

Git on windows is mainly managed by the Git interface, though this is a little cumbersome if you're not used to the command prompt and it is recommended that you try out tortoise git as a GUI generation friendly alternative. The best instrucitons for such an installation are provided here and on the git hub site itself.

For now there seems to be an issue with the proxy which I'm still resolving.