Kernel Development Learning Pipeline

Lecture 2 - 14 September 2023

Topics covered:

• Course roster is stabilizing
• Recent homework submissions
• Introduction to git

Course roster is stabilizing

• End of UMass Lowell Fall 2023 add drop period is approaching: September 19 for both undgraduates and graduates

  • Subsequent withdrawal from the course is not as painless

Recent homework submissions

• Nine (9) people made an initial submission on Tuesday (12 September 2023), which is excellent

• In general, key information for students to get started is in the lecture notes and students should read them carefully

• If any student has not registered on the KDLP website, please do so ASAP

  • Contact the KDLP team if there are any issues with setting up your credentials

• This registration provides students their credentials for:

  • The course dashboard for assignment feedback

  • The course chat system – a self-hosted matrix instance

  • The course email system for assignment submission and review

Introduction to git

• We used this slide deck

• Git is distributed version control software

• Git is not GitHub

  • GitHub is one implementation of an interface for git

  • There are variously featured alternatives, such as GitLab, Bitbucket, and cgit

  • The KDLP team maintain a custom-themed cgit instance here

• Git is built on a tree-like data structure that contains the entire change history of a project

• Git proficiency is of the most useful and valuable software engineering skills a computer science student can learn in preparation to enter the industry

• Charlie did a demo in the terminal. Here’s a rough outline of the various git commands he covered:

  • git clone: Cloning the ILKD_assignments repository

  • git commit: Committing new local changes to the repository

  • git merge: Combining two change histories into one

  • git reset: Undoing previous changes, and going nuclear with --hard

  • git rebase: Rewriting the git history

  • (single commit rewrite cases can be handled with git commit -amend)

  • When things don’t go right, you may have to resolve merge conflicts by manually editing source files and re-committing

  • This should not be something you have to do for this course, however for anyone who is interested, here is an article on merge conflicts

Important Reminders

E0 is due at 11:59PM next tuesday (19 September 2023)

See this video for more guidance on how to complete E0.

P0 is due at 11:59PM a week from next Tuesday (26 September 2023)

See this video for more guidance on how to complete P0.