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The problem of using git to write latex documents is that there is not built-in way to clearly see the differences from two different commits (SO discussion here). Git was originally written for code and the standard diff utils used are line oriented. Using diff --color-words can marginally obviate to this problem, but the solution is still unsatisfactory to me.

One excellent project is latexdiff .

I've recently added a hook in my git repository to send all my commits to identi.ca.

Managing the puppet manifest using a vcs is a best practice and there is a lot of material on the web. The easier way to do it, is to use git directly in the directory /etc/puppet and use a simple synchronization strategy with an external repo, either to publish your work, or simply to keep a backup somewhere.

Things are a bit more complicated when you would like to co-administer the machine with multiple people. Setting up user accounts, permission and everything can be a pain in the neck.

Update

There is an easier method to do all this using gbp-clone as described here. Ah !

Then to build the package, you just need to suggest git-buildpackage where to find the pristin-tar :

or you could simply describe (as suggested) the layout in debian/gbp.conf.

I'm definitely fed up with the lack of feature of svn. I always end up making backup copies of files, committing the wrong patch set, being unable to cherry-pick what to commit, not to talk about branching, merging and other marry activities. So today I overcome my laziness and setup a git svn repository for dose3 (since it's all there, go ahead, and be happy!).

The concept of git svn if pretty easy. You work with git, and from time to time, you commit in svn.

Note to Self

If you use github.com to host your projects these are two things to remember:

• if you want a download url that is different from http://github.com/$user/$proj/tarball/master you can create a tag in your repo, push it to github and enjoy and new link in the download tab. Then you can download your project as http://github.com/$user/$proj/tarball/0.1 where 0.1 is the tag.

I've packaged latexdiff for debian, that is a small utility to generate latex files with revision markers from multiple versions of the same file. While packaging this utility I've learned about two very nice tools to help the debian maintainers: git-buildpackage and topgit.

Regarding git-buildpackage there is an extensive manual that should get you started :
http://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.html

Topgit documentation is a bit sparse. tg help should guide you for syntax. The README file in the tg distribution is full of examples.