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From: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
To: Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Org, Diffs, and Version Control
Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:51:40 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87pqhxng5f.fsf@norang.ca> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <m2d3dx109v.fsf@pluto.luannocracy.com> (Dave Abrahams's message of "Sun, 16 Oct 2011 10:25:32 -0400")

Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:

> As I've been working on a fairly large Org outline over the past few
> days, I've discovered that the format is very ill-suited to management
> and review by (known) version control tools, like Git.  Indentation is
> always changing and volatile information like tags and priorities
> tends to mix with headlines, which makes diffs very hard to track.  This
> is to say nothing of the fact that diff itself is a poor format for
> understanding changes that simply reorganize parts of documents.
>
> I was wondering what other people do.  I want to make sure I understand
> the changes I'm making to my document and that I haven't unintentionally
> wiped out a great deal of important material (all the more likely to
> happen without me noticing because of Org's folding).
>
> Hints most appreciated,

The main thing I do is use org-indent-mode so indentation is not a
factor in the diffs.  Everything starts at column 1 and moving things
around and promoting headlines doesn't change the indent of the items.

I also use 'git log --stat' to get a quick overview of my hourly commits
to reassure myself that large parts of the document didn't get removed
by accident.  I normally only do this after archiving (which is monthly)
but this also makes is relatively easy to identify a commit where a
large block of content was removed in the event I want to restore the
old content.

I rarely have to resort to my git history to restore something (maybe 2
times a year?) but I really like the safety net of my hourly git commits
on my org-files so I can be confident I won't permanently lose anything
which is important to me.

HTH,
Bernt

next prev parent reply	other threads:[~2011-10-16 14:51 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2011-10-16 14:25 Org, Diffs, and Version Control Dave Abrahams
2011-10-16 14:51 ` Bernt Hansen [this message]
2011-10-16 15:25   ` Eric Schulte
2011-10-16 16:56     ` Herbert Sitz
2011-10-18 14:39 ` Karl Voit
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2011-10-17  6:55 Rustom Mody
2011-10-17  7:19 ` suvayu ali
2011-10-19 15:02 Rustom Mody

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