Repositories and version control

The service we use to host the repositories is called GitHub. As well as version control, this service provides features that integrate project management closely with the source files. This makes it much easier to keep track of progress, to collaborate and to act on community feedback.

GitHub is one of a number of services that are built around a version control technology called Git. Git is a powerful tool that helps collaborators to keep track as they add, remove, modify and share files — no matter where and when they each work on the project.

Git registers a complete history of changes in every source file in the repository, along with a note of which user account made those changes. So, everyone can see what is going on and authors can compare versions and roll back mistakes if they need to.

The repositories do not contain the outputs in their final form. We refer to the content that we store in the Git repositories (mostly Asciidoc content files, but some other files too) as the source content. We use software to compile the source cotnent into user-friendly output formats.