daaronr/aligning_two_projects_on_git.md

## aligning_two_projects_on_git.md

      
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    Git/Github Question I keep coming back to


I need to maintain 2 versions of a page, site, or report, for different audiences. E.g., one ‘public’ and one ‘private within group’

Key examples: Hosted RMd built bookdowns, GUI Gitbooks like this one


I keep each of these on distinct branches in the same repository


Alternatively I could make these separate repositories, one fork in the other, although that feels more bulky


I frequently want to compare the contents of each of these versions, moving content in both directions, but inspecting the content before I move it over


What I’ve tried/explored


Cherry pick individual commits from one branch to the other


this is good when the commit history is very careful and concise, but it doesn’t work when I have hundreds of commits, or when you only want material from part of a commit and not the whole commit


Pull request from one branch to another


but here I can’t figure out how to say “selectively introduced content” in an efficient way


Checkout individual files from a branch or manually move them from one branch to my hard drive and then do a manual comparison using vim’s spliutdiff.


This works but it’s tedious and feels like working around rather than with git and github


Git diff individual files between branches into a new file, and sort out changes
e.g., git diff make_publicable..main SUMMARY.md > SUMMARY_MERGE.md


but this leads to an output of a git diff file that I don’t have a handy and quick tool to reconcile. I can’t get it to come up as the Atom ‘your version’ ‘their version’ thing, for example

Any thoughts appreciated? Any tools or techniques I’m missing, or things I should read?
Suggestions and going-forward

Better commits and then you can cherrypick

DHJ:  Maybe cherry pick commits and use git squash to make your commit history more coherent?
DR: Yeah, in principle, when on the Private branch I should separate my 'content commits' into ones labeled 'content_for_public_too' and 'private_content'.
GH actions, 'hosted only'

DHJ: Or could you just produce an output and host that somewhere in public Eg using GitHub actions
DR: I need to learn GH actions. But I kind of need to allow people to add content to both versions (insiders can add to and view the private version, outsiders only the public version ... and then I need to decide which stuff should move from one to the other)