iMechanica - subversion - Comments

SVN works well with plain

biplab — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:37:34 -0500

SVN works well with plain text files. It can't generate binary diff. Binary diffs are not that easy to create and manage. And often the binary diff size is much higher than a normal text file diff. Some specialised tool, xDelta (http://xdelta.org/), can generate binary diff.

SVN may work well with latest doc files which are xml based. But the older doc files are binary files and are not directly manageable by SVN.

You may use in-built version management system of MS Word. Read the following article-

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305216/en-us

Biplab

http://biplab.in

That is handy Biswajit,

jaztuck — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:54:47 -0500

That is handy Biswajit, thanks. I am in the same boat with you Mark and I have to work with teams who still cannot leave MS Word. I find the doc only medium bland and a non-differentiator for sales. If they were open to at least use Google Docs things would be a lot more efficient but that still leaves the medium.

I created an app with Ruby on Rails called Honeypitch to be able to have teams collaborate and embed video, slideshows, Google spreadsheets, and more so I do not have to send 4 separate documents. It was designed for in house use then we had developers make it available for others.

The TortouseSVN tip is handy and I will share this with the team I work with who is afraid to use anything other than MS Word.

James

----

Proposal Automation and Sales Collaboration:

"Mashup Your Passion with Honeypitch" http://www.honeypitch.com

Re: Proposal collaboration and subversion

Biswajit Banerjee — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:26:58 -0500

Mark,

I'm a Unix and LaTeX person myself and Subversion has served me well. However, I've heard that you can use the MS-WIndows version of subversion (called TortoiseSVN ) for dealing with Word documents reasonably well. You could try out the instructions at Tips and Tricks on Word document management using SVN. I wonder well that works when multiple people are commiting changes simultaneously.

-- Biswajit

proposal collaboration

Mark E. Walter — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:56:21 -0500

Biswajit,

I am always looking for better ways to collaborate on proposals. I could see LaTex and SVN working well together, but what can you do with MSWord? A recent experience with GoogleDocs convinced me that it was not quite ready for what I wanted to do (figures, automatic labeling/numbering, etc). How did you collaborate with SVN? I find it hard to beat tracked changes in MSWord, but it is still best to work serially and not in parallel ...

thanks, mark

Subversion

Elizabeth M Kallman — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 02:48:47 -0500

Nice history of Subversion.

Re;Subversion

Biswajit Banerjee — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:41:33 -0500

Sukumar,

The user interfaces for cvs and svn are identical (almost) though the internals are slightly different. Once you have created a repository, the same basic commands apply. For instance, instead of "cvs checkout" you have "svn checkout" to check out a copy of the code. Similarly, "cvs add" becomes "svn add", "cvs commit" becomes "svn commit", "cvs update" becomes "svn update", and "cvs diff" becomes "svn diff". The versioning is a bit more fine grained in svn (with every new commit leading to an update of the version).

The main benefit of svn over cvs (that I see) is that a new repository is very easy to create with svn and new trunks can be easily spawned off from a tree. If you already know cvs you will only need to learn a few more rarely used commands to get going.

-- Biswajit

Subversion . . .

N. Sukumar — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:29:48 -0500

Biswajit,

Thanks a lot for the introduction and pointers on version control. I do use codes that are maintained under CVS and can definitely see the benefits of the same for code maintenance, apart from the ability for a large number of developers to easily work on the same code. Without CVS/subversion, this becomes a non-trivial and error-prone exercise. Hopefully, sooner than later, I will learn and adopt subversion in some of my own code development endeavors, and the links you have provided would be useful to get started.