Reduce the number of conflict resolution failures when using nbgitpuller to distribute content #32
Description
Problem Statement
As a student, I am expected to click links that are provided to me (through my LMS, course website, slack or other medium) that will launch a jupyter notebook pre-populated with content related to my assignment or class. This mostly works fine, and preserves any changes I make in my content, and am happy! But in some rare cases, it does not work, and throws me a scary black error box with messages about git that I don't really understand. Usually reaching out to my TAs can fix this, but it causes me stress and lost time.
As a TA, I often have to use the JupyterHub admin interface to run git commands to fix errors faced by some students when using nbgitpuller to distribute materials. I would very much rather spend my time on helping them learn, so more automatic ways to handle errors here would save me a lot of time.
Proposed Solution
We improve the conflict resolution algorithm in nbgitpuller to account for the most common conflicts, and resolve them better automatically.
This works together with #22, where we provide better error messages and actions users can take themselves when errors do happen. This initiative instead focuses on reducing the number of times errors happen at all.
Proposed Implementation
We will identify the most common causes of conflicts, and try to find automated solutions for them.
Our SOW has more complete information.
How will this fit in the ecosystem?
These will be upstream contributions to the nbgitpuller project.