Let's continue our gaming analogy from earlier chapters to relate to the multiplayer mode concept we have learned so far.
Think of your favorite adventure game that has multiple levels. Consider a scenario where you are stuck in a level without knowing how to proceed forward. After desperate attempts, which ended in vain, you suddenly realize that your friend is an expert on that level, and you want to use your friend's help. So you quickly share the last saved state of the game file with him with which he can finish that level for you, save the state, and push the file back to you, which will enable you to continue the game.
The same situation can apply to you when you are working with data files, especially when you are working as a team where different people take care of different parts of a bigger task to produce a single result. Another possibility might be that you want the domain experts to handle specific portions of the work, and so on.
This also means that having multiple people working on the same document one topic at a time, where one passes the file to another to get the work done in a sequence, might go smoothly, but having multiple people working on the same file on the same topic might end up in chaos when it comes to files containing binary data.
I'm a big fan of first person shooter (FPS) games. Counter-Strike stays at the top of my list even today. Let's take Counter-Strike or any other team game for comparison here. Each team member will be a specialist in not only one but two or three weapons to adapt to situations. And when required, they pitch in to take out the opponent together and complete the objective.
Similarly, when you deal with textual data in files, you can have multiple people collaboratively working on the same file, topic, and line, and manage to produce a unified output with Git. Let's learn how to put this feature to better use.
There are two commonly used modes to share your repository with others.
- Intranet
- Internet
Having got used to the way of sharing over the Internet using Bitbucket, this time let's emulate sharing over the intranet using the bare repository concepts we learned in Chapter 4, Split the Load – Distributed Working with Git.
Note
If you are not able to recall, I suggest you go through the Staying local – share over intranet topic in Chapter 4, Split the Load – Distributed Working with Git to understand what the bare repository is, why we need one, and how it operates.