Thesis Construction
Well, I finished the independent study class, got an A (yes!) and now it's time to move on to the thesis. I've been doing some literature review stuff recently and getting into things, but now it's time to start work on the actual text of the paper. But we're going to do this right from day 1-- none of this juggling versions around between my laptop, work computer, jump drive, home desktop, etc. Stick this sucker on the subversion server and go!
The only problem with that (and I don't know how many of you have worked with LaTeX-- probably not a whole lot) but it creates a bunch of log files and left over gunk which it produces while it's compiling your paper. This is useful if you run into an issue with it while it's compiling or if something's not working quite like you want, but you don't want that on your version control system. Just like with committing a software project to subversion, you don't want all your compiled executables or object files to be in the repository-- those aren't the code, they're just helper files-- get regenerated from the code each time you compile-- and they get changed every time you compile. So you don't want that in there or every time you compile the code Subversion will complain at you about there being changes when you really didn't change anything, just recompiled it. Anyway, LaTeX has a lot of the same stuff. You only want the base source files: the stuff that's necessary to build the paper-- the other stuff is just extraneous and is generated every time anyway.
So, for your benefit as well as mine, I'm posting a link to a guide I found which delineates what you don't need out of all that stuff in your LaTeX directory.
http://markelikalderon.com/blog/2007/08/02/latex-subversion-and-hygiene/
Very well put, also has a little guide which shows you how to get subversion to ignore the helper files. (Doesn't really apply if you're on windows and using TortoiseSVN, but still useful to have nonetheless).
It will also be helpful to check out this link, which seems to have a bit more complete list of helper files which aren't needed in the repository:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents
And there's that. Hope that helps someone.
The only problem with that (and I don't know how many of you have worked with LaTeX-- probably not a whole lot) but it creates a bunch of log files and left over gunk which it produces while it's compiling your paper. This is useful if you run into an issue with it while it's compiling or if something's not working quite like you want, but you don't want that on your version control system. Just like with committing a software project to subversion, you don't want all your compiled executables or object files to be in the repository-- those aren't the code, they're just helper files-- get regenerated from the code each time you compile-- and they get changed every time you compile. So you don't want that in there or every time you compile the code Subversion will complain at you about there being changes when you really didn't change anything, just recompiled it. Anyway, LaTeX has a lot of the same stuff. You only want the base source files: the stuff that's necessary to build the paper-- the other stuff is just extraneous and is generated every time anyway.
So, for your benefit as well as mine, I'm posting a link to a guide I found which delineates what you don't need out of all that stuff in your LaTeX directory.
http://markelikalderon.com/blog/2007/08/02/latex-subversion-and-hygiene/
Very well put, also has a little guide which shows you how to get subversion to ignore the helper files. (Doesn't really apply if you're on windows and using TortoiseSVN, but still useful to have nonetheless).
It will also be helpful to check out this link, which seems to have a bit more complete list of helper files which aren't needed in the repository:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Collaborative_Writing_of_LaTeX_Documents
And there's that. Hope that helps someone.