FrameMaker and Version Control Software

[Mike Feimster]

Subversion does NOT store the whole binary file every time you commit a change. As with text files, it only stores the diffs. (http://help.collab.net/index.jsp?topic=/faq/svnbinary.html).

We use Subversion for storing FrameMaker files and we use it in a very similar manner to the way we use it for source code. We use TortoiseSVN  on the desktop. We configure it to exclude lck files and we no longer make FM backup files. (Those really aren't needed because you have your revision history in SVN.)  Changes are committed regularly (more than once a day). 

The only tricky think is multiple people working with books. For that we use good old fashioned communication, i.e. talking to our coworkers. We also use the get lock command and the require-lock property on FM files to keep others from stepping on our changes. (Although SVN stores the diffs to save disk space, it doesn't allow you to merge changes with binary files.)

Mike Feimster
Test Automation Developer, Research & Development
o  843.413.8122 | tf  800.736.7425 x8122  |  e mike.feimster at acstechnologies.com


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Andy Kass
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 8:43 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: FrameMaker and Version Control Software

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
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