General guidelines for supervision

[robmoss]

The Collaborating section provides general guidelines for using a repository to collaborate on writing code and papers, but we could also outline some guidelines and practices for using a repository as a tool to assist in student/postdoc supervision and reviewing progress at regular supervision meetings.

In this situation, it is highly unlikely that there will be a single branch or pull request that captures all of the relevant work.

On possible solution is to create a new branch from a past commit in the main/master branch, merge all of the changes in main/master, and create a temporary pull request purely for the purpose of reviewing these changes:

# Manually identify the relevant starting commit.
git log --oneline --since='1 week ago'
# Alternatively:
# COMMIT_HASH=$(git log --pretty='%h' --since='1 week ago' | tail -n 1)

# NOTE: add the trailing "^" to begin at the commit *prior* to COMMIT_HASH.
git checkout -b review/weekly-supervisor-meeting "${COMMIT_HASH}^"
git merge master
git push -u origin

It's a little clunky, but I don't think that GitHub offers another option, so the alternative would be to use a graphical git client or the git command-line.