In the before times, people used all kinds of tricks to keep track of changes they made to documents or code. Some people named files and directories with numbers, like file 1.docx, file 2.docx, and so on. Eventually, this would devolve into utter chaos, like file 2 final.docx or file 2 final 2.docx!
Another strategy, for code, was to comment out old code in favor of newer code. For example:
def fancy_algorithm():
# old version
# if something:
# do_another()
# then_this()
# new version
if something and other_thing():
do_this_thing()
do_another_thing()This is pretty insane, because eventually the code becomes littered with dead code and no one can remember where it came from or what it did.
Thankfully, it has become commonplace to use a version control system, at least for source code if not for other documents as well (this web site is under version control, for example). A very popular system today is Git, which was originally built for the Linux kernel project. We will learn the basics of Git, the MIT page has a good tutorial and there are countless alternative tutorials online.
In class, we’re going to take a look at some standard workflows as well as some less common tasks.