An experiment in tracking versions of DOCX files in Git.
## Possible Approaches
[There's prior art to this, I go for something simpler.](http://blog.martinfenner.org/2014/08/25/using-microsoft-word-with-git/)
### Pre-commit hook which expands the archive so individual files can be tracked and diff'd
Modern Office file formats are ZIP archives with XML files in them.
Implemented in this repo.
Initially I figured recompressing them using the store method would pretty much turn them into human readable files save for the ZIP header garbage. VS Code diff will still treat them as binary files because of it, though, and I want to avoid reconfiguring the diff tool or the text editor for this. Also, even if this worked, any embedded images and other binary objects would still show up as garbage in the diff (and may cause the diff tool to lose track of individual "files" within the single store archive file), only the plaintext files from the archive would diff properly.
[Learn about Git hooks here.](https://git-scm.com/book/gr/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks)
That's why I decided to use a pre-commit hook instead to unpack the Office file before commiting and track the compressed and decompressed versions in parallel. [Learn about Git hooks here.](https://git-scm.com/book/gr/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks). Obviously a downside to this is that anyone can modify these generated files in the repository. I do not present a solution for this and I do recognize and agree to the fact that tracking generates files in Git is stupid, but then again, so is that with binary files and since I already need to track some binary files why not go stupid all the way and track generated files also. It's for an experiment only so, hey.
I am on Windows and I have installed Git using the official Windows installer. This should immediately raise some eyebrows when it comes to portability. What will Git on Windows do with the hooks? Run them using Batch/PowerShell? No, Git for Windows bundles it's own Bash through MinGW. MinGW has package manager so we could potentially install the `7z` package to it and have a nice, portable script. Ordinarily you install these packages through a MinGW UI, but either I don't know shit or Git doesn't bundle this PM GUI, nor does it bundle the `mingw-get` command for installing these packages. MinGW is horrible anyway so let's figure out a different route.
Since the pre-commit hook will run as a Bash script through MinGW, but we can't manage the MinGW packages, let's settle for the host OS packages/environment. The script will run in the repository root as it's working directory. We can invoke `cmd` or `powershell` here and do the `7z` magic from there maybe? Nah, that'd bring us back to Windows only solution.
How do we keep this portable without submitting to the MinGW bully? Let's utilize WSL! On Windows 10, we can invoke `bash` which will pick up the default WSL distro (learn about managing distros using `wslconfig` to see how to change the default) and we can have that execute our commands. So we can write a Unix script and use that on both Windows and Unix. I have not had success with invoking specific distros directly (using `ubuntu` in place of `bash` for example), but meh, best to stick with the default as that's likely the user preference anyway.
We're using the [bash shebang](https://stackoverflow.com/a/10383546/2715716) because we rely on `bash` anyway so `sh` won't cut it.
