4 ms·
Merging people's writing together doesn't seem to be as obvious as merging people's code together -- code is a means to an end, so whatever is the best solution
by mcrider 15y ago
Merging people's writing together doesn't seem to be as obvious as merging people's code together -- code is a means to an end, so whatever is the best solution should be merged into master. Writing is subjective, so if your paragraphs cause a merge issue, its not so simple to choose a winner.
- krallja 15y agoPull request: - its not so simple to choose + it's not so simple to choose
- mhartl 15y agoYou can put in a couple of spaces before each line to make the diff look even better: - its not so simple to choose + it's not so simple to choose
- mhartl 15y agoDear downvoter: this was a simple, helpful comment about the formatting supported by this site, and it didn't deserve your ire. Please go visit a site other than Hacker News. You are not welcome here.
- diminoten 15y agoI wasn't aware you even could downvote here. But even if you can who cares? I think elitism here is even more frowned upon than a downvote. But this is horribly off topic, so if you can downvote, we both should be downvoted.
- rcthompson 15y agoWell, basically, in the case of prose in version control, you don't want automatic merges for anything more than simple grammar or punctuation. Other than that, there's not really that much different.
- AncientPC 15y agoAt the same time it solves a collaboration issue that is limited to always online services like Google Docs. I remember my distributed computing professor checking out his LaTeX paper from a Subversion repo that had something like 2000+ commits between himself and other collaborators.
- mmahemoff 15y agoThis would imply wikipedia and other wikis don't work. It's really the next step in evolution beyond the centralized wiki.
- istvanp 15y agoYou also have to consider that conventional version control was designed specifically for programming code where diffs are done per line (as each line in programming typically serves a single purpose, e.g. assigning a variable). With written language however, that is typically less true. You would only put line breaks after paragraphs and such. Most of the line breaks end up being automatic margin wraps which serve no purpose other purpose than helping readability... Unless you work in version control. What you end up doing is making each paragraph a single line which destroys readability if you don't have virtual text wrapping. Case in point: https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/blob/master/Lord-of-the-Files.en.txt https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/blob/ma...
- unsigner 15y agoI think this is why formats like Markdown eat newlines, and need two consecutive newlines to produce a paragraph break. This allows you to split paragraphs in smaller chunks, sentences or sub-sentences, hopefully approaching the situation with programming code where line diffs work.