[10:30] Online Training: File Backup On-demand: Introduction to Revision Control with Subversion

This online tutorial will walk you through the basics of revision control when using SHARCNET. Revision control allows a developer to track changes to files and directories over time, allowing you to easily track changes made to development materials over time, permit multiple developers to be working on the same code base simultaneously and revert to earlier version of your code if necessary. It can even be used as a backup feature to help the user who wants to backup their important files frequently. The tool we will explore in this seminar is “Subversion” – a widely used revision control system that tracks changes that one makes to files and folders and keeps copies of revisions in a repository.

Many users have copies of files on SHARCNET and on their departmental computers or personal laptops. They do development on multiple systems and run jobs on SHARCNET. With copies of files and folders saved in a repository on a file server at SHARCNET, which is available to all users grouped by PIs, users can easily manage their files that may scatter across multiple systems by synchronizing them against the copies in the repository.

Subversion also allows one to share files with others in a group when working on a project. Individuals may make changes to the same file (assuming not at the same time in general) – checking out a file from the repository, making changes, committing the changes back to the reposity. Revisions of that file are tracked by the system and can be retrieved by others as needed.

In this tutorial, we will start with the basic concepts:

• Repository – A central location that stores revision history of your files.
• Working copies – Files and folders that you are currently working on.
• Check-in – Once you have a working version, you save it in the repository.
• Check-out – To retrieve an existing copy of the file from the repository.
• Update – Before you start working on a file, check to see if there have been any updates already made somewhere else.
• Commit – Flush changes made to the local, working copies to the repository.

We will go through these in details with examples. Working in a UNIX (like) environment is assumed.

This is an online seminar that you can attend through your web browser. Shortly before the start of this seminar, you can direct your web browser to http://my.dimdim.com/sharcnet/ (if you go directly to www.dimdim.com you can select “Join Meeting” and enter “sharcnet” for the meeting room, which is equivalent).