Re: st: Using version control software with Stata

[Jeph Herrin <info@flyingbuttress.net>]

This may be too crude for your purposes, but I do the following. At the 
top of every do-file I put two lines

 getnow
 copy <thisdofile>.do copies/<thisdofile>.$now.do, replace

-getnow- is just a personal -ado- that stores the current date and time 
in a global -now- in an OS-friendly format (eg, 2014.MM.DD.hh.mm). Thus, 
every time a do file is run, it makes a copy of itself with a time 
stamp. This is not proper version control, but it does leave a trail of 
every do file I've ever run. <copies> is usually a local subdirectory, 
but it could obviously be set up with a global as well.

This could be extended to ado files, I'd think.

I do end up with zillions of do files, but text storage is cheap.

hth,
Jeph



On 3/28/2014 1:23 AM, Timothy Mak wrote:
> Hi Statalist,
>
> I'm beginning to accumulate quite a lot of different do files and ado for the projects I'm working on, and am thinking of using a version control software to help me keep records of my programs. However, I don't have a computer programming background, and therefore no experience of using these things, and am not even sure it's something that's useful for do and ado files. However, if anyone on the list has experience to share in this regards, I'd very much love to hear.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Tim
>
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