Jupyter notebook syncing

[logancantin]

Every time that I pull the code, I get a merge conflict with the jupyter notebooks if they have changed or if I / anyone else have run the notebook. It becomes very hard to fix the merge conflicts, because I have to go in to the raw text file and manually fix the merge conflicts. Is a solution for this? Is there a git feature that automatically accepts incoming changes for a specific file?

[mark-r-anderson]

Unfortunately, because of all the metadata and output information that notebooks store, they aren't very good for being tracked through git. I do like them though since they are great for small examples and visualization. They also render nicely on GitHub.

We should definitely be better about handling them, though. My original intent was to just have them as examples and rarely touch them, but that hasn't worked out too well... So because of that, I almost never make changes to the Jupyter notebook that I intend to keep. If I do, I copy it to a different file. I also rarely commit the notebook. If merging in changes, I typically discard all changes I've made to the notebook first and pull them in. If I really need to commit something, I copy changes back over after merging since it's never more than a few lines.

Let's bring this up at the next meeting.