Document Revision Control

[Chris Despopoulos]

Hi Joseph...  Thanks for setting this straight.  I guess that would mean that saving in binary would be better than trying MIF as a text format for SVN!  Wow, imagine that.  




________________________________
 From: Joseph Lorenzini <jaloren at gmail.com>
To: despopoulos_chriss at yahoo.com 
Cc: FrameMaker Forum <framers at lists.frameusers.com> 
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 9:59 AM
Subject: Re: Document Revision Control
 

Hi Chris,

This issue you raised about binary files and SVN used to be true but is somewhat inaccurate now. I stayed away from SVN for a really long time because of this very issue. I thought it was ridiculous that every time I would make a commit, SVN would commit an entirely new version of the file. 

However, a couple years ago, the IT admin, who manages the SVN repos for my company, explained that later versions of SVN can in fact commit just the differences between two versions of the same binary file. I was able to confirm this with some testing of my own. The size of my doc repo would be exponentially larger if every commit was the entire FrameMaker file instead of the difference.

Now with that said, the following is still true:
1. committing large binary files is considered bad form and frowned upon from an engineering point of view. That's because SVN doesn't manage binaries nearly as well as it can handle text files.
2. The key thing that SVN still cannot do is actually perform SVN blame or diff two versions of the file for you. It can only commit the difference, it can't identify and compare the difference between version 1 and version 2 for you.

From a software development point of view, I can see why they'd hate on binaries. However, in terms of technical writing, I see the above concerns as addressable since there's a diffing capability built right into framemaker. All I have to do is check out two versions of a file and then have framemaker do a diff on them. Its not perfect but i think its good enough. 

Furthermore, to avoid issues with engineering, I have my own separate repository that's dedicated solely to documentation. Engineering doesn't know or care about it. 

Sincerely
Joseph Lorenzini

Original Message:

"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.?"
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