I like keeping my papers under git version control. Problem: my supervisor does not use Git, he just wants to read a PDF and make some changes in the text. I want to share the paper via Dropbox but I also want to keep my git repo under Dropbox, and I certainly don't want to go around doing an intricate dance of copying around folders.

To get started:

1. create a git repository with your paper, and commit
2. dropbox-paper init ~/Dropbbox/CureForCancerPaper this will clone the repo into your Dropbox, and setup a workcopy branch in the Dropbox folder, the remote repo is named dropbox-paper

It is perfectly safe to git push dropbox-paper master this will not alter the workcopy in the Dropbox folder, only the .git folder. Better yet you can call dropbox-paper push as this will push your changes, and update the workcopy - but only if it was not changed.

dropbox-paper status shows information about the workcopy status, and dropbox sync.

The folder in Dropbox is just another repo, but the checked out branch is not the master branch, instead it is called workcopy. This avoids issues when a push is done into dropbox.

dropbox-paper push will try a clean fast-forward merge if there are no changes in the working copy in Dropbox. If there are changes it will just print a message.