Revision Control Basics

Revision control is a part of any software flow. There are many revision control solutions in use today, starting with the humble CVS, through GIT, Perforce, IC Manage and Design Sync. Eclipse, being a relatively standard software tool, supports most, if not all revision control systems available today.

Some items such as GIT, come standard with Eclipse, some will need to be installed into Eclipse via either the Marketplace (Help>Eclipse Marketplace) or manual install (Help>Install New Software).

Eclipse can be used end-to-end to check out, manage and eventually delete your checked out area. It can also be used just as a "diff" front-end, where all the checking in and out gets done on the command line.

History View

The history view can be used to view the history of a given file. This view can be opened using the Window>Show View>Other>Team>History. Another way to open the view is to Right-click on a given file and Team>Show Local History.

Once you have the history view open you can use this view to look at the revision history of your file, to diffs between any two revisions etc.

There are a number of icons (shown in the image below) that control some of the behavior of the window.

Refresh: To refresh the history click on the icon shown, or select the history view and hit F5

Link with Editor: When this is selected, the history view will be updated each time you switch editors

Group by Date: Revision history is grouped by date

Show Local vs Remote Differences: These three icons control whether you are able to view your local edits, committed edits or both

File Compare

Comparing different revisions of files is easy and context dependent. Comparing two file revisions will open up the "Compare" window which will show the differences between two versions of the files. The Compare view

• Allows you to continue to edit
• Allows you to copy differences left or righ, all or the current difference
• Step through differences
• Retains your colorization

None of this is new, the new item to those coming from Vi/Emacs is that is that the comparison is done within your editor saving you the step of switching to the command line, and allowing edits to show up real-time.

From the History View: Right-click on a given file and "Compare Current with XXX"

Making your Project Revision Control Aware