Re: [O] Org, Diffs, and Version Control

[Bernt Hansen]

Dave Abrahams <address@hidden> 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