What is Version Control
Overview
Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
What is version control and why should I use it?
Objectives
Understand the benefits of an automated version control system.
Understand the basics of how automated version control systems work.
What is Version Control?
Also called revision control or source control. At their simplest these are tools which track changes to files.
Why should I use it? - Three reasons
1. A More Efficient Backup
We’ve all been in this situation before - multiple nearly-identical versions of the same file with no meaningful explanation of what the differences are.
If we’re just dealing with Docs, some word processors let us deal with this a little better, like Microsoft Word (“Track Changes”) or Google Docs version history. BUT research isn’t just Words docs, it’s code and data and diagrams too.
Using version control means we don’t keep dozens of different versions of our files hanging about taking up space, and when we store a revision, we store an explanation of what changed.
2. Reproducibility
When you use version control, at any point in the future, you can retrieve the correct versions of your documents, scripts or code. So, for example, a year after publication, you can get hold of the precise combination of scripts and data that you used to assemble a paper.
Version control makes reproducibility simpler. Without using version control it’s very hard to say that your research is truly reproducible…
3. To Aid Collaboration
As well as maintaining a revison history, VC tools also help multiple authors collaborate on the same file or set of files.
Professional software developers use VC work in large teams and to keep track of what they’ve done. They know who has changed what and when. And who to blame when things break!
Every large software development project relies on VC, and most programmers use it for their small jobs as well.
VC is not just for software: papers, small data sets - anything that changes over time, or needs to be shared can, and probably should be stored in a version control system.
We’ll look at both the backup and collaboration scenarios, but first it’s useful to understand what going on under the hood.
How do Version Control Tools Work?
Version control systems start by storing the base version of the file that you save and then store just the changes you made at each step on the way. You can think of it as a tape: if you rewind the tape and start at the base document, then you can play back each change and end up with your latest version.
Once you think of changes as separate from the document itself, you can then think about “playing back” different sets of changes onto the base document and getting different versions of the document. For example, two users can make independent sets of changes based on the same document.
If there aren’t conflicts, you can even try to play two sets of changes onto the same base document. A process call merging.
Version Control Alternatives
These are the most popular current Version Control systems:
Git is overwhelmingly the most popular version control system in academia, and beyond. It’s a distributed version control system, where every developer in a team has their own full copy of a repository, and can synchronise between them.
It’s partly become such a success thanks to sites like GitHub and GitLab, which make it easy to collaborate on a Git repository, and provide all kinds of extra tools to manage software projects. Plus, GitHub offers free upgraded membership to academics, students and educators- you can apply here.
If you’re working on old projects, or ones with very specific needs, you might use Mercurial, another distributed system, or possibly Subversion, a centralised system where there’s a single copy of the repository that everyone connects to.
Because Git is so popular, and making a GitHub account is so easy, we’re going to teach you how to use them.
Graphical User Interfaces
We’re going to teach you how to use Git on the command line. This isn’t the only way to use it, however- there are many different graphical user interfaces for Git, like:
Fundamentally, though, these are all just ‘wrappers’ around the command line version of Git. If you understand what they’re doing under the hood, you can easily switch between versions.
Key Points
Version control is like an unlimited ‘undo’.
Version control also allows many people to work in parallel.