Version control of Mathematica notebooks?

It's recommended to disable the file outline cache, which is the metadata you're referring to when you look at the notebook with a text editor. As you discovered, it can cause merge conflicts if multiple parties are editing the same notebook.

It's recommended to disable the file outline cache, which is the metadata you're referring to when you look at the notebook with a text editor. As you discovered, it can cause merge conflicts if multiple parties are editing the same notebook. This is easily disabled with the Option Inspector.In the Mathematica menu, go to Format?

Option Inspector..., in the top-left set the scope dropdown to Selected Notebook and search for FileOutlineCache in the search field. Set the option to False and save your notebook, and you should be all set. Note that this can make opening notebooks a little slower, but unless the notebook is rather large, you probably won't notice the difference.

Thanks! Doesn't solve my whole problem, but it gets me most of the way there -- I'll just try to avoid having to merge the actual cell contents, and slog through it in a text editor if absolutely necessary. :) – Etaoin May 14 '10 at 1:24 3 Another option that you might want to disable is TrackCellChangeTimes – krawyoti Aug 2 '10 at 21:22 2 Also useful is Cell --> Delete All Output and Notebook The package AuthorTools has NotebookDiff which could be hooked into a VCS's diff command.

Finally, there's an – Simon Nov 10 '10 at 22:14 ... old Perl script nbcache by Tim Wichmann -- but it probably needs updating. – Simon Jun 30 at 5:34.

Not a solution to your merging problem exactly, but this is how we handle notebooks and source control in my team. Basically, we treat Mathematica notebooks the way we'd treat binary files. They're checked-in, but: we always keep a pdf copy alongside the .

Nb (backup for restoring the information in case we lose, for some reason, the capability of readings . Nb files. Still proprietary format, but a bit more widespread, and chances are both Adobe and Wolfram won't simultaneously disappear) we do not allow merges we code-review only the final product (the rendered notebook) instead of the .

Nb file. We mostly use Mathematica for small proofs, explorations and sidetracks, so the above procedure works fine for us (our main documentation is in LaTeX, which produces friendlier documentation for non-mathematicians/non-programmers).

You should only get merge markers if the source control system detects changes to a single line by multiple users. The source control system adds markers to make if very clear where the conflicts are, and to force you to manually remove them (as you resolve each conflict). There is no way for a source control system to know how to do it automatically for you.

If the file is text, but is designed to be read by a program only, it may have no end of line characters at all (or very long lines). Therefore if multiple people are working on such a file you'll get many merge conflicts. I'm not familiar with the nb file format, but in general the solution to this problem is to ensure only one person is working on a file at a time (ie use an exclusive check-out mode for nb files).

The file format is important to the question. In practice, it's not particularly long-lined. The problem, as I mentioned, is that it's full of metadata.

I know what the merge process is all about, but for the most part we aren't dealing with the problem of reconciling two versions of the code -- for the most part the conflict is in metadata, and I don't think we care which version we take. In the cases where we do have to merge code by hand, the question is asking about useful ways of doing that. Exclusive checkout is the obvious answer, but I'm hoping to keep it as a last resort.

– Etaoin May 12 '10 at 7:44.

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