Open Source Comes to Campus/Resources: Difference between revisions

Start by saying:

* In open source software, people use version control to keep track of files as they change. To give you a sense of what this is for, how many of you have worked on group programming projects? (A few hands raise up.) One common way to do that is to email around copies of a file you're working on. When every person working on a project uses version control, they have their own copy of the project and they can make whatever changes they want, and they can synchronize with the main version....

* To talk about version control, I want to show you how version control works for purely text documents. So let's look at the Wikipedia page for Wellesley College.

* (Navigate web browser to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellesley_College )

* So one of the great things about Wikipedia is that the system keeps every track of every version of every article. The wiki system is a version control system, too. If you click on the "Edit" tab, you can see the built in way to edit every article. Let's take a look at the ''history'' tab here. (click history tab)

* (find yourself at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wellesley_College&action=history ; zoom in so it's large enough for people to see; make it really enormous)

* So here, you can see a little heading for every version of the page, including (mouse over the date) the time and date of that version, who made the ...

most recent version

with a web interface tracking versions of a document.

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used in open source that helps track versions of files