mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

["David Allouche" <address@hidden>]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Bas Spitters <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>  When writing an article in latex I have used a version control system (cvs,
>  svn) to work with co-authors. Does anyone have experience using a version
>  control system with texmacs files in this way?

Back then, I used GNU Arch on the texmacs documentation I was working on.

> Which version control system
>  supports merging changes/resolving conflicts in texmacs files well?

I'd expect the ranking of VCS for merging texmacs files is the same as
the ranking for merging source code files. Some are just painful to
merge with (CVS, Subversion), other are more helpful (bzr, hg, git,
darcs).

When it comes to the specific kind of conflict-generating situations
you get with texmacs files, I believe all free VCS fail roughly as
badly. They are all optimized for handling source code.

Bzr may give you somewhat more intelligent conflict areas (naive
diffing produces unnatural conflicts, bzr is optimized to produce more
natural conflicts). Git might be able to handle some file reordering,
or at least the git folks think it will. Other tools may have there
own little advantages too.

>  Are there any settings I need to change in texmacs to make this process 
> work?

Nope. The native texmacs file-format is reasonably VCS-friendly.

It would be nice if it was possible to disable automatic line wrapping
in the file data, since it tends to cause large spurious conflicts
when existing blocks are modified. Usually kdiff3 is a great help in
resolving such conflicts.

>  Texmacs stores chaching information in the file and I can imagine that this
>  causes conflicts. Does it?

It does. It's not a big deal though. When you get such conflicts, you
can safely remove all the conflicting cache data.

--
                                                            -- ddaa