I would stay away from YAML (almost at all costs).

For us to be able to help you, I think you need to give us some more details about the organization of your work. If each chapter is a separate text file, then you don’t really need to do any branching at all (assuming people will only make changes on their own files and not touch others’ work). If it is a single text file, branching (or anything else, to be honest) will not help much.

I assume chapters will have their separate files. As long as you can control who touches which file, everybody can work on the same branch (also referred to as “trunk based”). But if you fear that people may interfere with each other’s work (willingly or by accident), then it makes sense to create a branch per chapter to keep contributors at a distance from each other. But working on a single repository requires some sort of an agreement on the workflow.

I’m not sure you realize how “engineering disciplines” operate as crafts.

From the comment you are replying to:

[…] it’s not because what we do doesn’t have an element of craft in it, it’s because the concept of craftsmanship is not enough to explain what we do.

these comments on “operate like an engineering discipline” are mostly sourced from a cargo cult mentality

I have nothing to say to this. Have a nice day.

I’m one of those who think this book is outdated (or at least needs an update remain a “must read” for people working on software). The blog post linked as a top level comments does a good job of pointing out some of the problems. That’ not to say it’s worthless, but if we are going to recommend books to newcomers, they should reflect the state of the art understanding of the field.

It also reinforces this notion that software engineer has a craft component which really seems to rub some people the wrong way.

When it comes to craftsmanship, I also oppose Uncle Bob. Again, it’s not because what we do doesn’t have an element of craft in it, it’s because the concept of craftsmanship is not enough to explain what we do. Dave Farley does a great job of explaining the reasons in his conference talk: Taking Back “Software Engineering” – Craftsmanship is Insufficient • Dave Farley • GOTO 2022. We are not in the middle ages any longer, we need operate like an engineering discipline.

Careful with Paul. He may starve.

Who is Paul? Why is he killed? So many questions. And I’m still stuck at the chess board…

OK, I may have hit a wall with this one.

I think I will quit at this point.

That depends on the PR tool. I don’t know how others work, but Azure DevOps handles rebases quite well (as long as you are rebasing to the target of your PR).