The Mandelbear's Musings

In my previous curmudgeon post, Writing Without Distractions, I gave version control only a brief mention, and promised a follow-up post. That would be this one. This post is intended for people who are not in the software industry, including not only poets but other writers, students, people who program as a hobby, and programmers who have been in suspended animation for the last decade or three and are just now waking up.

The Wikipedia article on version control gives a pretty good overview, but it suffers from being way too general, and at the same time too focused on software development. This post is aimed at poets and other writers, and will be using the most popular version control system, git. (That Wikipedia article shares many of the same flaws as the one on version control.) My earlier post, Git: The other blockchain, was aimed at software developers and blockchain enthusiasts.

What is version control and why should I use it?

A version control system, also called a software configuration management (SCM) system, is a system for keeping track of changes in a collection of files. (The two terms have slightly different connotations and are used in different contexts, but it's like "writer" and "author" -- a distinction without much of a difference. For what it's worth, git's official website is git-scm.com/, but the first line of text on the site says that "Git is a free and open source distributed version control system". Then in the next paragraph they use the initialism SCM when they want to shorten it. Maybe it's easier to type? Go figure.)

So what does the ability to "track changes" really get you?

( Quite a lot, actually! )

...and Finally

The part you've been waiting for -- the end. This post is already long, so I'll just refer you to the resources for now. Expect another installment, though, and please feel free to suggest future topics.

Resources

Tutorials

• git help tutorial and git help tutorial-2. You may also have the Git User's Manual installed on your computer.
• Everyday Git.
• Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous. This is where I usually point newcomers to git. This is actually the third volume in the Learn Enough to Be Dangerous series; the first is about the command line and is a good place to start if you'rle a complete beginner with command-line tools.
• GitHub's Git and GitHub learning resources page has links to some good tutorials, too.
• Pro Git - Book Everything is in here, including installation instructions (in Chapter 1) and a tutorial (Chapter 2)

Digging Deeper

• Pro Git - Book The rest of Pro Git will take you as deep as you want to go.
• Git user's Manual.
• Git Git's official website
• Git - Reference This is the official reference manual, in the form of Unix "man" pages. That means that you can use the man command to read them, but it's easier to follow links on the web.
• git help - that's right, the manual is also available by way of git itself. That can be very convenient.
• Git - Wikipedia
• Version control - Wikipedia
• Software configuration management - Wikipedia
• Git: The other blockchain

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
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