Interactive examples of using git in research workflows

[robmoss]

I recently added an interactive example of resolving a merge commit ("Exercise: resolve a merge conflict") that uses a separate repository (gimlb-simple-merge-example).

The idea is to go one step beyond a toy example, so this repository starts with a README.md, a LICENSE, and some trivial data analysis. From this point, two branches are created that (a) add a second data set; and (b) modify the data analysis. The resulting merge commit has to reconcile these two new features.

My hope is that this is a useful example, in that it bears some similarity to actual research activities, while keeping the size of each commit small enough that they are (hopefully) comprehensible. We can then provide an accompanying narrative (e.g., a set of slides, or an exercise sheet) that walk participants through the research narrative, showing each commit in turn, highlighting the nature of the merge conflict, and demonstrating how to resolve the merge conflict.

Ideally, we should have a collection of exercises that demonstrate core version control concepts in the context of normal/plausible research activities.