Revision Control Tools

These are basic instructions for anyone who has not used any revision control tool before. There is lot more to this subject. You can find out more by using the Web, and using the on-line Unix documentation ("man" pages and "info").

A revision control (also called "version control") tool allows you to track revisions to both files and collections of file versions (configurations), obtain copies of past versions at any point, and roll back to older versions if you desire.

There are many different revision control tools, of both commercial and open source varieties. Integrated development environments typically will include a revision control system. You can also use revision control tools in a stand-alone fashion.

The following are some open-source revision-control tools that you will find installed on the CS Department systems:

• rcs - This is the grandmother of these three. It is for local use on a system, by a single user or members of a group.
• cvs - This is a layer over rcs that provides additional functionality for remote access to a server that can be shared among members of a group. Suport for CVS is built into the Eclipse IDE. See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecshare/ for an article on this.
• svn - Is a newer and fuller-featured system. It is used by SourceForge and Google Code, among many other groups. If you want to use SVN with Eclipse, that is possible. See http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecl-subversion/ for instructions.

In addition to these, you may also want to consider "git", which is used by the Linux kernel development community. This differs from the above in being based on a decentralized distributed model. You should be able to download and install it for yourself.

It is not practical for me to write tutorials on all of the above systems, or the many alternatives. I also cannot in good faith tell you which one to use, as I have only tried a few of them, and had limited experience with each of those. If you are in doubt, I would suggest you try either CVS or git.

References

• Overview
  There is survey article of the "top 7" open source version control systems at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/18/the-top-7-open-source-version-control-systems/.
• CVS
  • The page cvs.html contains some local notes about usage of CVS.
  • The page http://sc.fsu.edu/computing/tech-docs/225-svn-information is a more polished introduction to CVS
  • An explanation of how to use CVS with Eclipse is provided at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecshare/
• SVN
  • The page http://sc.fsu.edu/computing/tech-docs/225-svn-information provides an introduction to SVN.
  • An exlanation of how to use SVN with Eclipse is provided at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecl-subversion/
• Git
  • You can find information about git at http://git-scm.com/.