On 1/14/2024 2:52 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 2:27 PM sean<s...@rogue-research.com> wrote:
On 2024-01-13 16:11, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
There are not many compelling reasons
to use Subversion anymore, except the ability to check out only
subdirectories from a branch and the insistence that a single central
repository is the only source of truth.
The ability to `svn lock` files is very useful if your repo has a lot of
non-mergeable files, like say MS Office documents.
I have never once found that feature to be useful since I first used
Subversion back around 2001. Mind you, I'd treat Word documents as
binaries objects and not consider them suitable for incremental
changes in a source control system.
There are numerous documentation teams who I have worked with over the
years who would differ with this. Version control is essential for their
files (they may not be able to directly compare them, but they can tell
when changes were made and who made them), and having locking is the
only way to make this work (which is one of the reasons why Git will
never work for them).
However, I would agree with you that binaries generated from some other
source document is not appropriate for version control (e.g. checking in
PDF versions of documents), but Word documents are the primary source
documents, therefore needing version control.
Before I got these teams on to SVN, they were storing everything in a
shared folder with numerous old copies of each document laying around
(e.g. foo.doc, foo.doc.old, foo.doc.1jun2013, foo.doc.bak, etc), which
is an accident waiting to happen.
