Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Typical SCM activities

Probably the most common use pattern for any SCM, no matter which one is in play, and regardless of the specific command variations, is the following sequence of operations:

• Fetching a version of a given code base:
  • Usually, this will be the most recent version, perhaps from a specific branch for development, but any branch or version that needs to be retrieved could be fetched. In any event, the process will make a complete copy of the requested code base in some location on the local file-system, ready to be edited.
• Making changes to the local copy of the code.
• Reconciling any differences prior to committing changes:
  • The goal with this step is to pull down any changes that have been made to the same code base, ...