Best Version Control System for R

Question

I have many short and long R code snippets that I would like to track as they develop.

Does anyone have any recommendations or experience using version control software with R?

Answer 1

Use

• regardless of your colleagues, friends, ... use --- most systems are technically equivalent, and you want to promote, not impede collaboration.

• no matter what is supported in the editor or in the IDE that you use the most

since network effects always happen so often. A popular choice creates more users, which creates additional support in tools, etc.

I don’t care either. Source code is just text. Personally, I like SVN, and I use it at home, at work, in R-Forge, in Google Code, on Sourceforge, ... R Core also uses SVN, but, as I said, it does not really matter. Your choice, your headaches, when you need to administer or correct.

Answer 2

Subversion or Git will be my recommendations. I don’t think that the effectiveness of the version control system depends on the source code you put into it. R should not be different from Java or C # in this way.

Answer 3

There is nothing unique about R that drives a version control solution. There are many R projects hosted on Github (in Git) and on Google Code (in Mercurial or Subversion). R-Forge ( http://r-forge.r-project.org/ ) uses SVN.

You might want to look at this question for some insights into modern version control systems: Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar .

Assuming you will use either Git, Mercurial, or SVN, I would suggest looking at Github . It has many very nice features for collaboration.

Answer 4

Fossil is wonderfully easy to set up and get started quickly. It also includes a web interface, an error tracker and a wiki, all built into one executable file. Fossil is a version control system for SQLite (written by the same author) and runs on Mac, Win, and Linux.

Answer 5

I personally use and strongly suggest Eclipse with the StatET plugin combined with Subclipse for disruptive work.