Hi, Thanks for your comments on this topic. I agree that there is a large amount of work associated with any kind of filter for line breaks in our source files. My position on this problem, and on other limitations of using an SCM-type system for docs, is to clearly state the restrictions and guidelines under which we must collaborate. I see two possible guidelines to help us get effective use of SCM in the face of the line-break issue:
-Guidelines for setting line-breaks in your editor -Guidelines for editing files of books with multiple writers The former is not very likely to work, but I offer it as a springboard for other ideas on processes for collaborating in an imperfect world :) I propose the latter as an imperfect, but workable solution. Within Sun, I've used Teamware for docs large and small, helpsets, and man pages and it works, but merging is not desirable. So, for this project, it seems that merging is not likely to be something we recommend or support either. In other words, we can collaborate on docs together, but we cannot have more than one individual writing to a file at a time. If you want to write to a file, you must first check Teamware or whatever tool is chosen, to see if another writer has the file checked out. If another writer has the file checked out, you have to work offline and wait until the file is checked in to get access to the latest version. Then, you check it out, make your changes to the source, and check it back in. This is obvious process overhead, but I still think that the benefit of version control at the file level clearly outweighs the costs of checking on whether the file is available for checkout. To me, this is an acceptable limitation, but what do others think? Is 'file merging' a hard requirement? Is the ability to have folks working on the same files at once a requirement? Or are these issues that we can work around by agreeing on protocols for checkout/edit/checkin? thanks, Michelle This message posted from opensolaris.org
