Pegit - Version Control System

Introduction

This project is inspired by git.

Version control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later.

A VCS allows you to:

• revert files back to a previous state,
• revert the entire project back to a previous state,
• review changes made over time,
• check who last modified source code that might be causing a problem.

Using a VCS also means that if someone lose files, they can generally be recovered easily. In addition, you get all this for very little overhead.

Need and Requirement

As a part of their course plan/scheme students of computer science branch are required to make coding projects may it be in any language C, C++, Java, Python, HTML and so on. What the usual practice is, they make files namely(.c ,.h, .py, .html ...), or ReadMe files and various directories. They make single source code file and make all the changes in it and save it. What happens in this practice is that they keep on losing the original code and data. After making many additions and after editing the source code so many times, say, one encounters a bug (a software bug is an error, flaw, failure or fault in a computer program or system that causes it to produce an incorrect or unexpected result, or to behave in unintended ways), it is very difficult to trace the bug, meaning, it is very difficult to trace the part of the code which is responsible for the unexpected behavior.

Manual Solution

Possible solution can be cloning the whole source code each time before making even a minute change. This takes too much of users time (as code becomes larger) and also has memory limitation. There is repetition of those files too in which no change was made.

Automated Solution (Version Control System)

Version control system is an automated system which keeps tracks of all the changes in the repository of the project. System makes use of computer processing and uses database to know which files have been edited, deleted or newly created. When changes are made, the system will ask the developer if they are to be committed(saved). Developer can give command to the system to save them. Developer can retrieve any previous version of the project by accessing the database. If developer makes a mistake, he can roll back to a previous version. He can reproduce and understand a bug report on a past version of the project's source code. He can also undo specific edits without losing all the work that was done in the meanwhile. For any part of a file, he can determine when and why it was ever edited.

Prerequisites

If you are using gcc on Ubuntu, then you need to install zlib. You can find source code for zlib from here. Download the source code, compile it and install it. If you don't want to use zlib then you can use miniz which is provided along with the source code of pegit.

If you are using Windows, the you'll need Mingw with zlib provided with it. If there is no zlib in Mingw then build the pegit using miniz.

Building

Follow these instructions:

• Download the source code using git as follow.

    $ git clone https://github.com/jspd-group/pegit.git

• Move to the pegit directory.

    $ cd pegit

• Use the make to build the source

$ make
# or if you don't have zlib then execute the command as follows
$ make NO_ZLIB=1
# if you want to use gdb
$ make debug # or make debug NO_ZLIB=1
# there are also other options available which can be viewed using
$ make help

• Install the pegit using make

% make install # you need to be root before using this command