Document revision control

[Chris Despopoulos]

Just a word about MIF in source control.  It's true that storing binary files (.fm) in source control is somewhat abusive, because the system has to store a complete copy of the file for each revision.  In the old days dev would never let you do that because storage actually cost something.  You might be tempted to think that storing MIF would be an alternative...  It's text, so source control can store just deltas to each revision.  While that's technically true, you would not gain anything.  It turns out that MIF files store dates and unique IDs on just about every line in the file.  So from one MIF to another you don't have many (or any???) lines that are the same.  Given that a MIF file is usually as large as a binary, if source control has to store a delta that amounts to every line in the file, then you actually loose -- not only are you still consuming disk space, but the control system has to process the files to find the delta.  Also,
 merging would be out of the question because pretty much every line would show a change.  


Pretty much the only text format you can use for Maker documents is XML...  Yet another reason to consider it, BTW.
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