Using GitHub for version management

[kerc]

Have y'all considered using GitHub for tracking and controlling document versions and updated? I know that would mean having people become acquainted with the concepts of fetching, push, pull requests, and so on. But it would make it easier to coordinate work.

Thoughts?

[toddlyons]

I suggested it recently. It was a non-starter.

[coureur_d_bois]

Not everyone works in IT, let alone is a developer. Using Libre Office removes most of barriers to entry for contributors.

[kerc]

Oh, I am not suggesting to replace LibreOffice for editing (it's pretty much great), but rather to manage versioning.

[Solomoriah]

Git would treat the documents as binary lumps, which is not space-efficient.

[ThorinSchmidt]

Not everyone works in IT, let alone is a developer. Using Libre Office removes most of barriers to entry for contributors.

Git did start life as an IT development tool, but viewing it with such a lens is like saying that calculators are only useful to statisticians, or word processing software is only useful to secretaries.

The command-line interface of Git can be intimidating, and GUI versions of it have long been available because of that. Solo's comment about space inefficiency does have some merit, although modern storage capacities, coupled with the very real benefits of version control, along with specific merge capabilities outweigh that somewhat.

As an example off the top of my head: No two people can work on the same document at the same time. Git's merge feature would allow several to work on the document, make changes, and seamlessly incorporate them simultaneously. In the event where two people make changes to the same area? It gets flagged, and the person doing the merging simply picks which one they want (there's that pesky 'wokeism' again... ) Anyhow, I'll stop pretending I'm still a teacher and go back to lurking.

[chiisu81]

As an example off the top of my head: No two people can work on the same document at the same time. Git's merge feature would allow several to work on the document, make changes, and seamlessly incorporate them simultaneously.

Simultaneous editing, at least for this, would not be a plus.
This has been asked and answered, both in this thread and previously. Closing thread.