FrameMaker and Version Control Software

[Alison Craig]

Andy:

Thanks for all the information (FYI - I use unstructured FM9).

I use version control as version control as I do find myself having to go back to previous versions periodically (in the old MS Word days - pre June 2009 - I also needed to be able to rescue myself from a severe crash!).

However, backups are equally as important and until a couple of days ago, my VSS database was *never* getting backed up. If the place caught fire or we had a flood (and we're located in a major river delta flood plain), documentation would be screwed - and given that medical devices cannot legally ship without documentation, that means the whole company could be screwed.

I know FM and Word files (yes, I still have to maintain certain types of smaller documents in Word) take a lot more space than programming files, but until IT initiates a space discussion, I'll continue doing daily check outs and check ins. IMHO, not using this functionality negates the point of version control.

I had a conversation with my R&D contact yesterday and he told me that unlike VSS, SVN keeps all files (in a project?) at the same revision level at all times. That might be great for the programmer's but as the lone writer I can't see the benefit for me - at least not at the present time. It seems to me that this would only serve to bloat the db size.

I guess I need to play around with the various SVN options to see what I think is necessary without taking up more than my share of network/backup space.

Thanks again for the input.

Alison 

Alison Craig, Technical Writer
Ultrasonix Medical Corporation
Tel: (604) 279-8550, ext 127
E-mail: alison.craig at ultrasonix.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 5:43 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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