Using Git for Writing Papers

uring academic collaborations, we have different people working on a paper and the draft has a natural evolution. Most people are ok using a sync service like dropbox, or even just emailing tex sources to each other (gasp). Similar evolutions of projects also happen in the software industry, where the are dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of developers contributing stuff. And they manage their code via some version control system. This talk is to introduce a popular version control system called ‘git’, and the talk is going to be specifically tailored towards using git for writing papers etc. Mainly, it is to convince you guys that git is awesome, and easy, and really makes sense for academic papers.

As a disclaimer, the talk would *not* be about the *right* way to use ‘git’ but rather what in my opinion is the ‘easiest’ way to use git. I will introduce the basic ideas, and much of the talk would just be a demo of the various things you can do with git.

Request to the audience: If you have your laptop, please bring it during the talk so that you can try out the examples by yourself; it would really accelerate the learning. Preferably, you can install git before the talk (For ubuntu/debian, you probably have to run ‘sudo apt-get install git’ on a terminal. For Windows, you can install from via www.git-scm.com etc.) This would then let me focus the talk on just ‘git’ rather than OS-specific installation processes etc.