It is recommended to read the brief introduction to the system.
The central part to collaboration is the repository. The systems administrator will have set the repository up, will have initialized it, and issued its URL. If the repository is a secure one, set up the secure shell keys to access it.
The repository is now ready for use. It remains to add users who make use of this repository and share their data through it.
In this tutorial it will be user Jim. In Bibledit, Jim opens the project he wishes to share with others, or he creates a new project. He goes to menu Preferences / Git repository. and sets everything up. Jim can now work on Bibledit as before, and his data will be automatically updated in the repository.
Now we come to the purpose of everything, which is working together on one project.
This collaboration is very simple: Just work on your data as you did before.
Bibledit cares for everything, and everything will be updated and shared automatically.
On rare occasions you might notice that the chapter you are working on changes. This happens if somebody else works on the same chapter as you, and made some changes in it.
Suppose that two or more people collaborate on one project. One of them is a bad typist. He makes many errors. The bad typist has the potential the harm or destroy the project's data. If he makes serious mistakes in his own data, then the collaboration mechanism will propage his mistakes to the other members of the team. This is not a desirable situation.
Bibledit has a solution for this situation. You can use two mechanisms of Bibledit simultanously.
1. Collaboration through the network or the USB stick.
2. Merging changes.
This is how to do it:
1. The experienced person has project "master" that has the master copy of the Bible. Collaboration of the master project is switched off so that no changes can enter that project by mistake.
2. The experienced person has project "messy" that initially is a copy of the master project. Collaboration is switched on.
3. The unexperienced typist has project "messy" too, with collaboration switched on.
4. The unexperienced typist makes changes in project "messy", and through collaboration these changes go into project "messy" of the experienced typist too. This all goes automatic.
5. Once in a while the experienced person goes to the Merge tool. He opens project "master" and project "messy", reviews the changes as proposed in project "messy", makes any edits he likes, takes out any mistakes he does not like, and then finally merges the changes from "messy" into "master". This is done chapter by chapter. Once the merge is done, project "master" and "messy" are identical again in that particular chapter.
6. Any changes entered or not entered propagate to the unexperienced typist again through the collaboration. If the unexperienced typist made a big mess in a certain chapter, through the collaboration this mess is cleared up again on his computer.
- The collaboration system can conveniently be used for automatic backup.
- Collaboration of two projects on the same computer is possible if those projects have the same ancestor, that is, one is created by importing all the Biblebooks exported of the other one. This can be helpful for demo purposes and to test and learn to use this tool if only one computer is available.
- Sending and receiving the data of your Bible will happen automatically at intervals. Bibledit will receive any changes from the repository, and then send its own changes to that repository. To manually send and receive your Bible, use menu File / Send / receive.
- Using collaboration with merging data has advantages in the following situation: Think of the situation that a bad typist is out in the bush, and comes to town with his stick, and has little time for the master person to merge while he waits. So just plugging in he stick, a quick automatic merge, and away he goes again. Then if the master person has some time in the days or weeks following, he can then carefully go through the messy project, and merge it with the master project, taking his time for it, and doing an accurate job.