Week 4 Lab: Reconstruct the Graph

Take a real chain of "Save As" filenames and draw the branch-and-merge graph it's actually implying, then check it against the content

15 March 2027

Before the session#

Find a chain of files that grew by repeated “Save As”: draft essays, a group assignment passed between collaborators, a document with a folder full of _v2, _final, _edits variants. You need at least three files with a plausible shared ancestor.

Read enough of each to answer, for every pair: does one contain the other’s changes, do they diverge independently from a common point, or is one simply a dead end nobody built on.

In the session#

Draw the graph: nodes for files, edges for “this one came from that one.” Compare it to what the filenames alone would have implied. Chains rarely match perfectly. A file named _v2 sometimes turns out to be a dead-end branch nobody merged, while an unremarkable name turns out to be the one everyone actually built on.

Afterwards#

Keep the graph. It’s the same kind of object a version-control system would have produced automatically, from the same underlying edits. Next week asks how people did this reconstruction before that automation existed at all.