For a variety of reasons that will soon become clear over on our Voxeo Developer’s Corner blog, I (Dan York) want to talk a bit about the Git distributed version control system and how it differs from non-distributed version control systems such as CVS and SVN.

Now wait a minute, you say, you aren’t a programmer, so why should you care?

Well, the reality is that I’ve used version control systems for writing books… developing courseware… for web sites… for configuration files… even for home directories of users. Basically, any time I have had a group of files where I want to track revisions to those files – or have wanted to collaborate with someone else and have a solid history of what changes we each have made. Once you start using a version control system, it is simply amazing the number of uses you have for them (only some of which might actually involve programming).

Anyway, “traditional” version control systems (also sometimes called “source code management” (SCM) systems, although there are nuances in the naming) such as the open source Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion (SVN) and the many commercial equivalents all more or less use the model of having a central server from which users “check out” files and then “check in” (or “commit”) any changes they make back to the central server. In more recent years, distributed version control systems (DVCS) have emerged that fundamentally change the paradigm for how a user interacts with their information. Several new open source DVCS’ have emerged, including darcs, mercurial, bazaar and git. For several reasons, I’m currently working with git, but most of what I cover in this and the next episode are similar across the various DVCS systems.

In this first of three episodes I talk about version control systems in general and the different components that make up such a system. I discuss repositories, working copies as well as concepts such as branching and merging – and then wrap up with a few of the issues associated with traditional systems such as CVS and SVN that git sets out to solve.

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 Emerging Tech Talk #024 - Learning Git, Part 1 - Intro to Version Control Systems [9:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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This Voxeo podcast can be found on the web at http://blogs.voxeo.com/ett. If you have comments or feedback about this show, you can either leave comments here on the show blog site or email Dan York.

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