How do you combine “Revision Control” with “Workflow” for R?

Question

I remember coming across R users writing that they use \"Revision control\" (e.g: \"Source control\"), and I am curious to know: How do you combine \"Revision control\" with

Answer 1

My workflow is not that different than Bernd's. I usually have a main directory where I put all my *.R code files. As soon as I have more than about 5 lines in a text file I start version control, in my case git. Most of my work is not in a team context meaning that I'm the only one changing my code. As soon as I make a substantive change (yes that is subjective) I do a check in. I agree with Dirk that this process is orthogonal to the workflow.

I use Eclipse + StatET and while there is a plugin for git in Eclipse (EGit and probably others), I don't use it. I'm in Windows and just use git-gui for Windows. Here's some more options.

There's a lot of room for personal idiosyncrasies in version control, but I recommend this one tip as a best practice: if you report results to others (i.e. journal article, your team, management in your firm) ALWAYS do a version control check in right before running results that go out to others. Invariably, 3 months later someone will look at your results and ask some question about the code which you can't answer unless you know the EXACT state of the code when you produced those results. So make it a practice and put in the comments "this is the version of the code that I used for 4th quarter financials" or whatever your use case is.

Also keep in mind that version control is no replacement for a good backup plan. My motto is: "3 copies. 2 geographies. 1 mind at peace."

EDIT (Feb 24, 2010): Joel Spolsky, one of the founders of Stack Overflow, just released a highly visual and very cool intro to Mercurial. This tutorial alone may be reason to adopt Mercurial if you have not already chosen a revision control system. I think when it comes to Git vs. Mercurial the most important advice is to chose one and use it. Maybe use what your friends/coworkers use or use the one with the best tutorial. But just use one already! ;)