Hi there, we are a small tram of social researchers working on writing a collective report together. The report has several chapters. Our plan is to use git to store changes and easily traceback to different versions as well as allowing everyone to experiment with new ideas.
I am trying to decide a branching strategy, and so far I guess something like feature branching could do. We could have a branch for each chapter…? And maybe, when a chapter is kind ready, we could merge into main…?
We will have members working potentially on different parts of the report in different moments.
Advice is needed. Thank you!
Not sure if this advice really applies, given i haven’t used Git for any reports myself and I don’t know how you are doing the text based project. I did pretty much all my uni reports in a online latex document site which allowed shared editing, so there was some history but all edits were live to the main doc.
But with the power of latex at least, you can have the main file do import and usages, and maybe some setup. And then combine other files representing anything you want. Such as one for front page, one per chapter or one for appendixes.
Then just can do changes/new sections in feature style branches, and it’s up to you if you want things to go to the main branch, or have a dev like branch where further refinement can happen if your work is structured and not all over the place like my report writing was.
Unless you need a “stable” version of your in-development work I wouldn’t split parts of it into branches.
Use branches to draft and explore changes, and merge them when they’re accepted into the baseline draft/current state.
Don’t be afraid to merge “better than before but not final or complete or conclusive” work. You’re trying to evolve, not construct final parts to combine. They won’t ever be final.
