Version Control

When I was writting my first journal article, as many of others, I used file names to indicate its version. I had a manuscrip.docx as the beginning draft, sent to other coauthors to review, included the comments and ended up as manuscript_v2.docx. Typically, this will end up as manuscript_final.docx, which you wish to be the last version.

A typical roadmap for saving your files is shown below.

manuscript.docx
manuscript_v2.docx
manuscript_v3.docx
...
manuscript_final.docx

In reality, this list goes on.

manuscript_final_v2.docx
manuscript_final_v3.docx
...
manuscript_final_never_change.docx
...

This is a live form of version control, despite being in a very inefficient way.

If you only have two or three versions it's probably fine. However, the drawbacks are quite obvious:

• You have multiple copies of the same document in the same folder.

• Only you remember (hopefully) what has been done. It's hard to include others to collaborate.

• It's hard to know easily which one contains what changes.

• It lacks clarity on why you've made certain changes.

• There's no rules to protect the history, e.g. you could save a change in a previous version by accident.

In addition, this will quickly become unmanagable when there are associated files (like experiment data) for each version.

There's a much better way.