[GoLUG] Presentation notes for Autodidacticism with ChatGPT, from 10/4/2023

[Barry Fishman]

On 2023-10-18 17:52:19 -07, Syeed Ali wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2023 06:41:21 -0400
> Barry Fishman <barry at ecubist.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2023-10-17 16:29:01 -07, Syeed Ali wrote:
>> > This is what everyone was supposed to have seen when I was doing it
>> > live. Unfortunately LibreOffice Impress didn't have "d" to
>> > duplicate, so I had been frantically _deleting_ slides when doing
>> > last minute changes.  :(  
>> 
>> This is why, when I am working on a project I always make the
>> directory a Git repository and 'commit' my work at crucial points.
>> It makes a log of what I have done, and allows me to go back to
>> crucial points if I make a mistake. If I want to try a different
>> approach, I can fork.
>> 
>> Some people save backup files (even renamed ones), but they don't
>> have a log of what they were doing when they were at that point in
>> making changes.
>
> I didn't include it in a repo because the LireOffice Impresses .odp
> files are binary.  However, they are zip files which have text
> within.  I wonder if git can be taught about that.

I haven't used LibreOffice, so I didn't consider binary files.

Git will save and maintain binary blobs just fine.  However, it can't
compress them, so each commit expands the repository by the size of the
file, and 'git diff' and 'git merge' become useless.

The extra space may or may not be a concern to you, especially if you
are just using Git to tag changes in files while you work on them, and
just 'rm .git' when you are done.  It's then just a log on what
you did on each commit, so you can find an appropriate rollback
point if some of your changes take you on a wrong path.

Alternatively, if you find Git generally useful for maintaining the
documents long term, you might consider using '.fodp' rather than '.odp'
format for the files you keep in the repository.  Then just output a
'.odp', '.pptx', '.pdf' or whatever format you need to distribute it.

As I understand it 'fodp' files are just the XML text document
compressed in the zip file, which will be larger, but compress and store
better within longer term Git repositories.  While operations like
merges may be even less pleasant then they are with normal text files :-(
they are at least possible.

It all depends on your situation, and how comfortable you are with Git.
-- 
Barry