Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• Where are we heading?

Objectives

• See an existing repository in action.

• Browse the history.

• See the big picture first before we dive into details.

In-browser session

• We will explore and visualize an existing Git repository on GitHub
• The goal of this episode is not to teach GitHub, but rather to get a glimpse of the wider picture before going into the details.

Why

• Often our first contact with Git is an existing repository
• The existing repository is often on GitHub (but this demonstration applies equally well to GitLab or Bitbucket).
• It’s good to see the social aspect to know what our end goal is.

Don’t Panic

• If you are new to version control, don’t worry about the details of the steps. Focus on what we can learn about the repository

Demo

We’ll start with a very simple existing repository that contains a brief history from a few different people

• History
  • Explore the repository.
  • Explore the history.
  • Browse the commit.
  • Note that there are branches.
• Reproducibility
  • Demonstrate the ‘blame’ feature.
• Collaboration
  • You can refer to code portions (so much simpler to send a link rather than describe which file to open and where to scroll to).
  • Demonstrate a pull request
  • Browse the network.
  • See contributors.
• Releases
  • Explore the history again.
  • Create a release.

While some of these are GitHub features, it all can be done on other sites, or by yourself without GitHub at all.

Key Points

• GitHub is a service that uses git and provides functionality to collaborate with other people

• We can browse the history of the contents of repositories and see who made which changes