this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Hi there, we are a small tram of social researchers working on writing a collective report together. The report has several chapters. Our plan is to use git to store changes and easily traceback to different versions as well as allowing everyone to experiment with new ideas.

I am trying to decide a branching strategy, and so far I guess something like feature branching could do. We could have a branch for each chapter..? And maybe, when a chapter is kind ready, we could merge into main..?

We will have members working potentially on different parts of the report in different moments.

Advice is needed. Thank you!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For us to be able to help you, I think you need to give us some more details about the organization of your work. If each chapter is a separate text file, then you don't really need to do any branching at all (assuming people will only make changes on their own files and not touch others' work). If it is a single text file, branching (or anything else, to be honest) will not help much.

I assume chapters will have their separate files. As long as you can control who touches which file, everybody can work on the same branch (also referred to as "trunk based"). But if you fear that people may interfere with each other's work (willingly or by accident), then it makes sense to create a branch per chapter to keep contributors at a distance from each other. But working on a single repository requires some sort of an agreement on the workflow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I totally agree. We have a file for each chapter. We might just keep a trunk based approach mainly, and resort to short lived branches to allow writers to get their contributions reviewed.

Thank you for the advice