Backstory: For the past year I’ve been using source control management software to manage and version all of my text files (which is where I do all of my writing, and most of my “real work.") I started out using subversion, which is a good piece of software under some circumstances. This post is about my transition to a different system, that system, and a look at how my production is impacted by this switch. Only more interesting. ;)

Basically here’s how subversion works: it has a database, that collects file names and the content of the files, and then every time you tell it to, it takes a snapshot of your files, and stores in the database the difference between the current version and the previous version. Sounds great? It is, but here’s the problem: suppose you have two people working on the files at once, so the snapshots that both of them are sending back to the database become less and less alike as time goes on. Secondly, it relies on file names, rather than file content to distinguish between files.

So problems spring up when you have more than one copy in play, and when you have file names that can change, and while the program compensates for these problems, they are core problems which cannot be remedied. In truth, I think subversion is a great tool for people with one computer who are editing/refactoring code or text, but not particularly for people who are in the process of generating new code or text.

Enter stage left, git. Which rather than revising subversion or another system despite it’s flaws, attempts to solve the problem of tracking the history/changes of a given project in a completely different way. The system, is built around the idea of combining divergent codes/texts into a single whole, so the whole system is built around easily merging different copies of a given project, rather than storing the one true canonical version of a text.

This means, that you can build experimental branches, tell the program that “now I’m going to see what happens to the novel if I turn this character’s face blue,” and edit/write with that idea for a while without affecting the “main strand” of your story. This means you can have working copies of your novel on 3 different machines, at the same time, and painlessly merge them together at whim, and it just works. Also as an added benefit git is faster by several orders of magnitude, which means it’s completely viable to regularly and automatically back up using git over a network. This alone is an amazing feature.

The down side is that, whereas subversion, uses a very centralized and linear model that is easily grokable by most people, git works in a very different way that’s hard to grasp at first. Thankfully, these days at least, the documentation is much better. I watched a talk by the creator of the software, who also wrote something called Linux, you might have heard about it, where he was introduced as having written a piece of software “so complex only he could understand it.”

And that’s not very hard from the truth. Its a wonderful tool, and I like that it pushes me to think about my progress and work in a different, and productive way. All this by way of saying, some software--subversion, the world wide web, and windows, and os x--works in very predictable ways that fit with the way you think about information and data and ultimately the world. And then there’s software that requires a different perspective, that isn’t intuitive, but works in the most effective way to accomplish a given kind of task (like collaboration, or backup, in the case of git), or like efficient reading of websites (like say, RSS). And these paradigm shifting programs, are I think, terribly fascinating, both as a computer user, and I think also as a science fiction writer…

I’ll gather some resources that I’ve found useful regarding git, and post them up here soon.

In the mean time, think well!