TeX Hour

A weekly video meeting

Fun and games with Git and Fossil

Background

Jonathan Fine: Git is the version control system developed by Linus Torvalds to host the development of Linux. Famously, Torvalds says he developed only two pieces of software and he named them both after themself. These items are Linux and Git.

Fossil SCM deserves to be better known. Richard Hipp developed both SQLite and Fossil (and named neither after himself). The one is ‘SQL for the browser’ and the other an ‘all-in-one’ platform for version control, bug tracking and wiki. Fossil hosts SQLite development.

Both Git and Fossil are peer-to-peer Distributed Version Control Systems. I know Git well, and am new to Fossil. I expect to find that each has advantages over the other.

This TeX Hour

In this TeX Hour I’ll show you some of the unusual things I’m doing with Git (such as using it solely as an object store) and what I’ve discovered between now and then about Fossil.

This TeX Hour connects quite nicely to last week’s Same inputs via the XML Catalog. That TeX Hour was about using a Git object store instead of files on disk, via an entity Resolver (which is an XML concept).

Diversions

For TeX enthusiasts, the Fossil Users Guide is available in both HTML (of course) and rather nice looking PDF. This sort of thing help’s keep TeX relevant and up-to-date. And it communicates print document structure traditions to the new world of web browsers and HTML.

Finally, this year’s Nobel Prize for went to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. Or in other words, the study of Fossils. The prize committee Chair said “Over the years to come this will give us huge insights into human physiology.”

So well done and thank you, Svante Pääbo.

URLs

For more information about the TeX Hour, including Zoom URL, see the About page.

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