Plan for Software Carpentry 2012 Boot Camp on Version Control¶

About the session¶

The session is a two hour interactive live workshop, using EasyMercurial and the Mercurial command-line tool.

Its goal is to explain version control and introduce Mercurial to researchers who have never used it before, or who want to understand it better.

Outline¶

The basic plan is:

1. Presentation introduction to version control in general (using either whiteboard drawings or a PowerPoint presentation)
2. Long worked example in which basic topics of version control are worked through using EasyMercurial and then some more advanced topics are returned to using the command-line tool
3. Closing remarks talking about other tools, other topics of interest etc

Worked example¶

Preliminary: Check that participants have EasyMercurial installed and working. All of the following exercises will be using EasyMercurial unless it says otherwise.

Part 1: Working by yourself¶

Topics: Initialising a repository, committing files, reading history, looking at diffs, reverting unwanted changes, going back in time to look at old versions

We will be working on a recipe for fish stew for a future recipe book.

Adding your first file¶

• Make a new directory, create a text file fishstew.txt in it, start adding an ingredients list, save
• Run up EasyMercurial, "Open" that directory, see fishstew.txt in untracked file list: that means the version control system is not going to keep track of any changes unless we tell it to
• Add file: that tells the version control system to keep track of any future changes to it
• Commit: that sets in stone our having added the file. A commit is a checkpoint
• Supply a message, note that we now have some history

Changing things¶

• Edit the file, change something, save it
• Note that the file is now marked as modified. (We might also see a backup file ending ~ or .bak from that editor -- we'll come back to that in a moment)
• Each revision records the state of all files, not just one file: add another file, omelette.txt and add that
• Commit change, note that we now have two revisions
• Review the history and look at the diff

Digression: every action we're taking here corresponds to one command-line command: show hg log, hg diff etc

• Go back to that backup file in My Work, add it to ignored list, commit

Managing history¶

• The history is not just for information: we can go back to the previous version by updating to it...
• ... and then a normal update gets us back to the latest version again

Let's say this version is the one that we're going to send off to our agent, to see whether they can sell it to a publisher (or whatever we do in these modern times).

• Tag the current revision as v0.1 -- digression about sensible tag names on whiteboard?
• We can now identify this version easily in the history
• Make and commit another change, this one involving renaming a file
• What if we make a change and decide we don't want to commit it? Edit something, then hit Revert

Now we have history, but we are still in big trouble if our computer fails. Thus...

Part 2: Working by yourself, but "with backups"¶

Topics: Clone, push and pull, using an online repo

Pushing local repository to a remote one¶

• Register an account on Bitbucket and create a new private repository
• Look up its URL
• In EasyMercurial, hit the Push button, enter URL, push to remote repo, check that the history is present and correct on the site

Synchronising new changes¶

• Make another change locally, commit (perhaps do this more than once before pushing)
• Push the change(s), and check the history on site again

Recovering from a disaster¶

• Exit EasyMercurial. Delete the local repository / working copy folder completely!
• Start EasyMercurial again, see that (sniff) the working copy is lost
• Clone it again from Bitbucket and note that the history is all there

Digression: Note command-line usage again, hg push, hg pull, hg clone: show a sequence of clones, modifying the last one and pushing back along the chain?

• Worked example, part 3: Introducing other developers
  • Topics: Conflicts, merges
  • Pair up and, in each pair, decide whose Bitbucket repo you will be working on and whose we'll just leave for now. (We should pair the "instructor" with someone as well)
  • Remark: in real-world use, this could very well be the same person just using two different computers
  • The second person in the pair should then clone the repository from Bitbucket
  • Both people can then make some edits: they should edit the same file
  • The second user should push their changes to the remote repo first
  • The first user then tries to push. They should get the "Push failed... The local repository may have been changed" message
  • Then the first user pulls instead. (Perhaps checks the Incoming list first?) History graph now shows two heads -- digression on sociological nature of conflict a la Greg if feeling expansive
  • Hit Merge, get the merge window up. Do an "instructor-guided" merge
  • Commit, push, get collaborator to pull
  • Run annotate (blame) on the recipe to see who changed what and when
• Worked example, part 4: More sophisticated business at the command-line
  • hg archive: packaging from a tag
  • hg id: provenance when running experiments
  • hg bisect: finding the origin of bugs you can't see (analogy with hg annotate for finding bugs you can see)

Things not yet incorporated into the above: Copying, renaming, deleting files; Branching and merging amonst branches; Stuff that is different in other systems

Should we cover (named) branches and merges between them? I think yes, if there is time.

Against: perhaps a level of complication too far for a two-hour intro; Greg doesn't cover them in the Subversion version; lessons learned from Hg are not immediately applicable to git or Subversion because the branching methods are somewhat different.

For: they are much simpler to use in Mercurial than in Subversion!

Quiz¶

The Software Carpentry Subversion course includes a quiz -- I like quizzes. Let's try adjusting the questions for Mercurial:

• Why is it a good idea to use version control on your projects?
• What is a version control repository?
• Suppose you’ve created a new file on your computer and you want to start using version control for it. How do you go about doing this?
• Jon is working on a version-controlled project with Ainsley and Tommy. He wakes up early one day, ready to do some work on the project. What is the first thing he should do?
• Tommy and Jon have up-to-date local repositories, and are both editing a file that contains 10 lines of data. Jon makes a change to the fifth line, and commits and pushes his changes to the remote repository they're both using. Tommy makes a change to the first line of the file, commits his changes, and tries to push them. What will happen, and what should Tommy do next?
• Ainsley and Jon are up-to-date, and are both editing the sixth line of a file. Jon commits and pushes his changes first. When Ainsley commits and tries to push, what will happen, and what should she do next?
• How do you undo local changes to files that have not been committed?
• Give the shell commands you would use to accomplish the following tasks:

  Check out the repository located at http://example.com/repo into the directory /cygwin/home/repo
  View the log of changes
  Add the file “experiment.txt” to the repository
  Commit the file to the repository.
  Update the local copy to reflect any new changes in the remote repository