Version Control with Git

Chapter 1. Introduction

Background

No cautious, creative person starts a project nowadays without a back-up strategy. Because data is ephemeral and can be lost easily—through an errant code change or a catastrophic disk crash, say—it is wise to maintain a living archive of all work.

For text and code projects, the back-up strategy typically includes version control, or tracking and managing revisions. Each developer can make several revisions per day, and the ever-increasing corpus serves simultaneously as repository, project narrative, communication medium, and team and product management tool. Given its pivotal role, version control is most effective when tailored to the working habits and goals of the project team.

A tool that manages and tracks different versions of software or other content is referred to generically as a version control system (VCS), a source code manager (SCM), a revision control system (RCS), and with several other permutations of the words “revision,” “version,” “code,” “content,” “control,” “management,” and “system.” Although the authors and users of each tool might debate esoterics, each system addresses the same issues: develop and maintain a repository of content, provide access to historical editions of each datum, and record all changes in a log. In this book, the term version control system (VCS) is used to refer generically to any form of revision control system.

This book covers Git, a particularly powerful, flexible, and low-overhead version control tool that makes collaborative development a pleasure. Git was invented by Linus Torvalds to support the development of the Linux Kernel, but it has since proven valuable to a wide range of projects.