FrameMaker and Version Control Software

[Andy Kass]

Hi,

I'm on digest, so a bit late to this discussion.

I wanted to clarify that version control and backups serve 2 different purposes. And although version control inherently does backup, it does it inefficiently (uses more space) in the case of unstructured FM's binary files. For binary files, version control stores the whole file every time. So if you change a comma, update your book, and commit your change, every file in the entire book will be archived to the repository (about 5 MB in our case).

For structured FM, whose text files are like code, version control is actually a very useful tool for backup because it provides all the benefits of version control (no locking necessary, concurrent changes, merging, rollback), and can be used as an efficient backup if you commit the files every day (or more often). IMHO, this functionality and simplicity is a huge benefit of structured FM (and SGML-based writing tools in general).

We use unstructured FM 8 with SVN for version control, and here's our process:

We only do checkins (commits) at major milestones (writer handoffs or releases) to reduce the impact of binary FM files on SVN. Then we check out from SVN to our PC drives (not backed up) and copy the files back and forth to a working directory on a backed up network drive. This keeps the very large SVN repository from taking up too much space on the networked drive and it keeps FM (and myself) from polluting my SVN directory with lock files, backup files, and other temporary working files.

Because I don't work directly on my repository files, I only need a few SVN commands that I can do from the command line--so I don't use tortoise (but others in my team do).

For locking, the SVN mechanism isn't very easy to use, so we just have a wiki pages that we update to indicate a lock--and we only lock entire books at a time. However, if I'm only fixing a bug or modifying one chapter, I'll only commit the one file. This leaves the checked in book in an unpublishable state, but we have to do a full production before the next release anyway.


Regards,

  Andy