3.2.2 Version controlled source ¶

The publicly distributed Gnuastro tarball (for example, gnuastro-X.X.tar.gz) does not contain the revision history, it is only a snapshot of the source code at one significant instant of Gnuastro’s history (specified by the version number, see Version numbering), ready to be configured and built. To be able to develop successfully, the revision history of the code can be very useful to track when something was added or changed, also some updates that are not yet officially released might be in it.

We use Git for the version control of Gnuastro. For those who are not familiar with it, we recommend the ProGit book. The whole book is publicly available for online reading and downloading and does a wonderful job at explaining the concepts and best practices.

Let’s assume you want to keep Gnuastro in the TOPGNUASTRO directory (can be any directory, change the value below). The full version controlled history of Gnuastro can be cloned in TOPGNUASTRO/gnuastro by running the following commands⁹⁴:

$ TOPGNUASTRO=/home/yourname/Research/projects/
$ cd $TOPGNUASTRO
$ git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/gnuastro.git

The $TOPGNUASTRO/gnuastro directory will contain hand-written (version controlled) source code for Gnuastro’s programs, libraries, this book and the tests. All are divided into sub-directories with standard and very descriptive names. The version controlled files in the top cloned directory are either mainly in capital letters (for example, THANKS and README) or mainly written in small-caps (for example, configure.ac and Makefile.am). The former are non-programming, standard writing for human readers containing high-level information about the whole package. The latter are instructions to customize the GNU build system for Gnuastro. For more on Gnuastro’s source code structure, please see Developing. We will not go any deeper here.

The cloned Gnuastro source cannot immediately be configured, compiled, or installed since it only contains hand-written files, not automatically generated or imported files which do all the hard work of the build process. See Bootstrapping for the process of generating and importing those files (it is not too hard!). Once you have bootstrapped Gnuastro, you can run the standard procedures (in Quick start). Very soon after you have cloned it, Gnuastro’s main master branch will be updated on the main repository (since the developers are actively working on Gnuastro), for the best practices in keeping your local history in sync with the main repository see Synchronizing.

• Bootstrapping
• Synchronizing