Developer Guide: How-to install & configure VCS for development on Ubuntu

Context

Ubuntu Desktop for developers is a new documentation set that is geared towards application developers who wish to use Ubuntu Desktop as their development platform. It is not meant for developers who participate in the development of the Ubuntu distribution itself (nothing is stopping them from using the guidance the docs provide, but their use case is not what informs the strategy for the content of this docs set).

The Dev Guide focuses on work with six toolchains:

GCC
Python
Java
.NET
Rust
Golang

The basic structure of the docs set consists of two main parts:

Generic guidance about Ubuntu Desktop installation and set up specifics for developers
Toolchain-specific guidance on how to install and start using the indiv. toolchains and related tooling

Task

Develop docs to populate the generic-guidance part of the docs set, i.e., the non-toolchain-specific parts of the Developer Guide. There are three parts to this:

set up and installation
version control
IDEs

This task is about the 2nd part: How-to install & configure VCS for development on Ubuntu.

A very quick how-to guide (see Diataxis how-to and/or talk to @rkratky) on installing and setting up Git on Ubuntu Desktop for app development (with a fleeting mention about the availability of other VCS (CVS, SVN, Mercurial, proprietary?), esp. Bazaar for those who might need it for Ubuntu-related development).

This SHOULD NOT duplicate any existing (up-to-date) documentation on general installation. Links (or points in prerequisites) should be provided to this generic installation content (#135). The gist of this article should be:

Basic intro into CVS on Ubuntu; emphasis on Git
Git install & config (what's needed on top of default install)
- GitHub/GitLab integration (pointers to offic. docs on SSH-key upload etc.)
- Launchpad considerations - Best practices (default Git aliases, .gitignore, ...)
Useful tooling (Git shell setup, TUIs, GUIs, pre-commit, ...)

This article SHOULD NOT go into details about specific IDEs -- a link should be provided to the respective how-to that covers that topic in detail (#137).

Reference

Diataxis: How-to guides
GitHub: ubuntu-for-developers-docs

Note: This docs set is not yet published because it's still largely incomplete. If you decide to work on this issue, I will provide you with access details to be able to see the non-public version.

canonical / open-documentation-academy