Literate programming with git

Hi,

I've recently been experimenting with using git to make software more human-readable. Presenting software for humans to read is not a new idea (Knuth's 'literate programming'), but I think git can be a new tool for showing the development of code in a structured way. Merge-commits can break a flat sequence of commits into sections and subsections, in the same way that a document's paragraphs are arranged. The hierarchical organisation is helpful when reading the history, and also allows that history to be rendered into a structured document explaining the code's development.

As a demo, I've created:

    http://www.redfrontdoor.org/20160813-literate-git-demo/index.html

This was generated directly from the git repo of the project, using tools I wrote:

    https://github.com/bennorth/literate-git

For working with hierarchical git histories, I wrote another tool:

    https://github.com/bennorth/git-dendrify

The READMEs of the two projects give more details of these ideas.

This is at the prototype / proof-of-concept stage --- any feedback welcome!

Thanks,

Ben.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Ben North <ben@redfrontdoor.org> wrote:

So looking at the Readme there:

    * Add printing facility
    |\
    | * Add watermarks
    | |\
    | | * Allow choice of colour
    | | * Add known-good test cases
    | | * Emit watermark 'underneath' main output
    | | * Drop-down for common watermarks
    | |/
    | * Add actual printing via PDF
    | |\
    | | * Submit PDF to system print service
    ...

This reminds me of the workflow of git itself. (As a literate consumer) You get an easy top-level overview what the community is interested in via e.g.:

    git log --first-parent --oneline

That would be equivalent to showing only
    * Add printing facility

If you run that command on "* Add printing facility"^2 you would see the headlines of the section.

However in gits reality we do not have these nice sections building on top of each other, as many people are interested in different things and build where they see fit.

How does the linearify/dendrify work with already non-linear history?

Thanks, Stefan

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the remarks.

That's a nice observation on how to use the existing git tools to view a structured history with different levels of detail.

Yes, reality isn't always clean! But each individual contributor can structure their own branch in a hierarchical way if they think it would be helpful, before publishing it for review.

If you attempt to 'linearize' a section of history which isn't of the required hierarchical form, the tool exits without doing anything. (Because this is only at the experimenting stage, there may well be situations where it fails to detect an unexpected structure, but see also next paragraph.) Similarly, if you attempt to 'dendrify' a section of history which isn't purely linear, it refuses.

In any case, the tool only ever creates a new branch so your original history is unaltered.

Thanks,

Ben.