Document Revision Control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

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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