Hi,
I am trying to maintain a shared database with collaborators. I keep
a version controlled (mercurial) copy of my master.bib file in a
Dropbox folder along with a directory with all my autofiled papers:
.hg/...
master.bib
BibDesk/<papers here>
I then clone this and edit my cloned master.bib, allowing my
collaborators (who don't use mercurial) to edit the dropbox version.
Periodically I commit there changes, my changes, and merge the two to
keep them in sync.
This is kind of working, but I am having a few irritations and would
appreciate some suggestions on how to smooth the workflow.
1) In order for all of us to see the papers, I had to "File papers in
fixed location" "~/Dropbox/bibtex/BibDesk/". Reading previous
articles I thought that "File papers relative to each document" would
work, but I could never get this to work on my collaborators machines
(the papers were always missing "?" even though when I would autofile
on their machine, they would go to the correct spot. Should this have
worked? (In which case I could try to debug further).
2) Although things work now, each time I open master.bib and save it
on my machine *all* the Bdesk-File fields change. This means that
whenever I merge my changes with theirs, I see a different field in
*every* record. This noise makes it very inconvenient to find out
what has changed. It does not matter which version I keep (as long as
the files were autofiled properly) as BibDesk is able to find the
files through the absolute link (which must be encoded in the
Bdesk-File string).
Is there a way to turn this off so that only the relative path name?
I know this has been discussed before, and having the links to the
actual files has many benefits, but for this workflow it is a real
pain. Perhaps there is some way of telling my vc software to ignore
these lines, but then I might miss a few cases where the files were
not properly autofiled (and hence not moved to the Dropbox folder).
In short, for this workflow I think having simply the filename text
would be the best option.
3) In order for things to work properly, I have to make sure that all
collaborators set their preferences so that the generated cite-key and
autofile filenames are identical. It seems that these should be
stored on a per database level (in or along with the master.bib file)
rather than application level preferences. Is there a streamlined way
of ensuring that all collaborators have the same preferences for the
database? (Maybe some sort of partial .plist file I could include in
the repository that could be read when editing this database?)
4) In order to ensure that the autofile names are unique I would like
to include either the Doi or Eprint fields, however, often only one of
these is defined. Is there a way of specifying the autofile name so
that these fields are conditionally included? I tried something like
"%s{Doi}[%f{Doi}][%f{Eprint}]" but the nested variables do not expand.
Any suggestions? The current behaviour would be fine if I could
disable the incomplete info warning message and have autofile work
automatically unless *both* fields are empty.
Apart from these issues, this workflow is quite successful.
Thanks for a very useful tool!
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