Expert Android Studio

Chapter 9Using Source Control: GIT

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Sharing your project to source control
• Using Git on the command line
• Third-party tools for Git
• Android Studio Git integration

Whether you are using Git or something else, the source control system is an important part of the software development lifecycle. Whether you are working in a team or on your own, source control systems provide a full history of what you have been doing and ease the management of changes to and versioning of the code.

Popular source control systems, both free or paid and open source or vendor-based, have been around for quite a while. CVS was one of the early popular source control systems that many developers have been familiar with since the early 2000s. Later, SVN became a popular and widely used source control system, mostly replacing CVS thanks to its transactional commits. Commercial source control systems also emerged, such as IBM's ClearCase and Microsoft's SourceSafe.

However, the search for better source control did not end. Mercurial and Git became available around the same time, both addressing the same issue: distributed source control. From its introduction, Git has been widely accepted by many large open source projects, such as Linux and Eclipse. With the help of GitHub, which hosts many open source projects, Git has been the de facto standard for source control.

This book covers Git because it is currently the most widely accepted source control system among Android developers, ...