-nogit: Using git to track files without using git
+nogit: Using git to track files without the user using git
Summary
=======
Let's see, nogit is a very simple tool that uses git under the hood to
-allow for collaboration on files, but without requiring the the
+allow for collaboration on files, but without requiring the
collaborators to invoke git commands. Any time a user might invoke
"git commit", or "git push", or "git pull", etc. the user instead just
invokes "nogit sync". And the user will not be prompted to fill out a
commit message or to resolve conflicts, etc.
+This is not intended as an alternative to git. If you're already using
+git, please continue to do so, (creating clean code history with
+detailed commit messages, etc.). Instead, nogit is intended for text
+files that you otherwise wouldn't have even put into git. And
+specifically, it's only suitable for text files where a naive "union
+merge" is the right thing. To be precise, a nogit merge will always
+silently give you "both sides" of any merge conflict, and will not
+provide any conflict markers, (it won't even indicate that any
+conflict happened). It also won't give any predictable behavior on the
+ordering of lines in cases like this. So if your data isn't safe
+against that kind of corruption, then you'll probably not want to use
+it with nogit.
+
+The original data for which nogit was invented for was a simple TODO
+list where different people were adding items they wanted to work on,
+then removing them when they completed them. These people wanted to
+keep each other informed about their activities, so they wanted to
+share items in a single file. But there was no functional significance
+to the order of items. Finally, it was unlikely that two people would
+edit any one item in two different ways, (and even if they did it
+would be trivial and painless to sort this out after the fact).
+
+Installation
+============
+The nogit implementation is a simple bash script named "nogit". To
+install it, simply copy it to a directory on your PATH. Or, if you'd
+like to be able to follow along with nogit changes from a git
+repository, you might create a symlink from a directory on your PATH
+to the nogit script in the git repostiory.
+
+Usage
+=====
+Presumably, you've been pointed to a repository which is intended to
+be used with nogit. These repositories are often paired with a
+"parent" repository that is being tracked with git. If so, the
+procedure for cloning should look something like this:
+
+ git clone /url/of/parent
+ cd parent
+ nogit clone /url/of/nogit/child
+
+And after that, you can run "nogit sync" whenever convenient, (when
+you've made changes or you think there might be upstream changes to
+the files being tracked in the nogit repository). Note that "nogit
+sync" should not ever ask for user input, so it's appropriate to call
+"nogit sync" from an autoamted system, (such as a text editor's hook
+when saving a file).
+
+Integration with emacs
+======================
+If you're an emacs user, here is some code you could put into your
+.emacs file to have "nogit sync" called automatically for you for any
+nogit-controlled files whenever you open one, begin editing it, or
+save it:
+
+ ; Run "nogit sync" if there is a .noggit directory here.
+ ;
+ ; Note: There is an important protection built into this implementation:
+ ;
+ ; We bind 'in-nogit-sync and test whether it's bound to avoid
+ ; infinite recursion. This could otherwise come about because
+ ; the revert-buffer function could trigger the find-file-hook
+ ; and recurse.
+ (defun nogit-sync-if-configured ()
+ (interactive)
+ (save-match-data
+ (if (and
+ (buffer-file-name)
+ (file-exists-p (format "%s/../.nogit" (buffer-file-name)))
+ (not (boundp 'in-nogit-sync))
+ )
+ (let ((in-nogit-sync t))
+ (message (substring (shell-command-to-string "nogit sync") 0 -1))
+ (revert-buffer nil t)
+ )
+ )
+ )
+ )
+
+ ; Arrange to run "nogit sync" when the user loads a nogit-controlled file,
+ ; starts editing it for the first time, or saves it.
+ (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'nogit-sync-if-configured)
+ (add-hook 'first-change-hook 'nogit-sync-if-configured)
+ (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'nogit-sync-if-configured)
+
+Preparing git repositories for use with nogit
+=============================================
+If you're interested in setting up a parent and child repository for
+use with nogit, there's almost nothing to it. In the child repository,
+just put all of the files you want to be treated with nogit's
+semantics. You don't need to fiddle with any .gitattributes or
+merge=union configuration. The nogit clone will do everything
+necessary for you so you get those semantics.
+
+Then, in the parent repository, you'll simply want to augment your
+.gitignore file to ignore all nogit-managed files from the child
+repository as well as the ".nogit" directory itself.
+
Motivation
==========
-
I originally came up with nogit when I started maintaining a simple
TODO file for a project which had a code implementation split across
multiple code repositories. I was intentionally keeping my TODO file
projects / nogit / blobdiff