Re: use case: keep the output of a markup (TeX) file under revision control

From: Paul Menzel <paulepanter@users.sourceforge.net>
Date: Feb 17, 2011, 19:51 UTC
Message-ID: <1297972319.3944.30.camel@mattotaupa>
In-Reply-To: <4D5D0EA2.4000805@atlas-elektronik.com>

Am Donnerstag, den 17.02.2011, 13:03 +0100 schrieb Stefan Naewe:

> On 2/17/2011 11:37 AM, Paul Menzel wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> > (Please CC me when replying since I am not subscribed.)
> > 
> > I have the following use case and need an advise from you professionals.
> > 
> > A friend and I are writing a paper using TeX¹ and keep the files under
> > revision control using Git. This works fine so far. But I want to also
> > have the output (PDF) of the markup file under revision control to be
> > able to access the PDF files even if for example no TeX installation is
> > available on a system.
> > 
> > The problem now is, since the output is no plain text file, that
> > merging/rebasing always shows conflicts which Git, of course, cannot
> > solve.
> > 
> > Is there a way to set that up so that there are no conflicts? Would a
> > pre-commit hook work which generates the PDF file prior to committing?
> > And if no TeX installation is available it would just ignore the PDF
> > files?
> > 
> > I could not find anything on the Web because having PDF as search string
> > would just show up how to generate documentation about Git.
> 
> Why don't you keep the PDF files in a separate branch ? Look at git's
> git repository (http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git) in the html 
> and man branches.

Very interesting. Thank you very much for this hint.

Is the used solution in git’s git repository a result of the problem with maintaining generated output from source files or does it have other other advantages too?

When creating TeX documents – at least in my work flow – I always have the PDF file open in parallel. Would that be a problem when having it in a separate branch?

Also I guess that this is done automatically too (saying autogenerated in `git log origin/man`). I could not find the script though.

        $ git grep Autogen
        git-gui/Makefile:        echo '# Autogenerated by git-gui Makefile' >$@ && \
        git-gui/git-gui.sh:if {[gets $fd] eq {# Autogenerated by git-gui Makefile}} {

and searching for »git "Autogenerated manpages for"« did not return anything useful for me.

Additionally I am confused where the SHA id g43f9f in »Autogenerated manpages for v1.7.4.1-42-g43f9f« comes from. I could not find that commit in `origin/master` or `git log v1.7.4.1`.

The last thing is that in git’s git repository the autogeneration of the manual pages does not seem to happen every commit (Is it a cron job?). In my use case the PDF file should be generated after every commit. Is a separate branch the way to go here?

Thanks,

Paul