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

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

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

quoted

(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