Using git to track my PhD thesis, couple of questions

[seanh <seanh.nospam@gmail.com>]

I'm planning to use git to track my PhD thesis as I work on it and to 
let my supervisors track it. I've setup a git repository and a gitweb 
instance showing it. There are a couple of specific requirements.

1. My supervisors don't want to see all the little commits that I make 
day by day. So I'll commit to a dev branch, then whenever I've made 
significant progress will merge it into a trunk branch. I want the trunk 
branch to get all the changes but as one big commit, not inherit all the 
little commits like a normal merge would do. I think this is a `git 
merge --squash`. Btw the help for that command ends quite brilliantly: 
"(or more in case of an octopus)".

2. They don't want to look at the latex source but the PDFs built from 
it, which they're going to annotate with their comments. So I need an 
easy way for them to get the PDF of each commit from gitweb without 
having to checkout the repo and build it themselves. Normally I 
wouldn't commit the PDF files into the repo because they're compiled 
files not source files, but it seems that just building a PDF and 
committing it along with each commit to trunk would be by far the 
easiest way to achieve this. But will git store the PDFs efficiently, or 
will the repo start to get really big?

Thanks