Source Control for Frame

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:53:38 -0600, Donald M Rinderknecht 
<Donald.M.Rinderknecht at noaa.gov> wrote:

>Folks have mentioned going to MIF files or XML. Wouldn't those options 
>add steps to the workflow? I assume they (MIF or XML) would affect the 
>workflow in a similar fashion. Also, going to XML would require 
>structure (I assume) so I don't think we're ready for that. We've 
>started to use structure in some docs, but I haven't had time to 
>implement that broadly.

We did try using MIF with CVS at one point.  In fact, that's
why we added MIF as an output format in Mif2Go, since the
process of getting MIF that is usable for this purpose is 
a bit convoluted.  (If you just SaveAs MIF to a different 
directory, Frame kindly updates your paths, making the result
unusable in the original context.)  This is a Mif2Go freebie,
BTW, that works fine in the demo version.

However, after a little while, we stopped.  Why?  Because
some of the CVS files, for the *IX.fm files in particular,
were ballooning up to huge sizes.  It turns out that each
time you generate an index, you get different ObjectIDs
for everything, and every one of them was a "difference".
Even with the rest, the MIF file compare provided by CVS
was nearly useless, as you had to look at the MIF *code*
to see what happened.  We're MIF experts, but that was a
bit too much to deal with for the purpose intended.

Currently, we just make a .zip for all the files in each
release, and archive that .zip.  If we need to compare,
we get out the old and new .fm files, rename one, and do
the compare in Frame.  But we hardly ever need to do that.
For docs, source-control comparisons may be a solution
looking for a problem.  It sounds good, but really...  ;-)

That said, if you are just looking for text content 
comparison, you could SaveAs plain text, and archive 
*that* in CVS or SVN.  Then you'll get it working the
way programmers do, which could actually be helpful.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/