Karyn Hunt wrote: > So I'm wondering, how many of you out there use branching > when checking your Frame files in to a source code control > system and how many of you just overwrite in one place?
And Laura Sponhour wrote: > Harvest can't compare FM files, so, like you, we don't have > branches to go back to for versions from previous releases. We don't check our FM files into our source control system (Subversion, but it used to be CVS), only the Help and PDF files that go into the software build. So I'm not exactly an expert on this stuff. But, I don't understand what you mean by "overwrite" and not being able to go back to previous versions. The whole point of a source control system is to never "overwrite" anything and to keep every version. Whether you check files into a branch or into the head is irrelevant. You should be able to go back and get any FM file that you committed to the repository. Committing a new version will never "overwrite" a previous version; the only way a previous version disappears from the repository is if someone consciously and deliberately removes it. Which, I suppose, someone could do (but it would be wrong!) because of the space problem binary files create... You see, source control systems are primarily intended to store text files, and can do that very space-efficiently: they can compare two versions of a text file and only store the deltas -- the differences between the previous version and the new one. Each new commit of the file adds only a small set of deltas to the repository, which can reconstruct any commit version by assembling the correct deltas. When you store binary files (like FM files), most source control systems can't compare/diff those, so they have to store a complete new copy of the file each time it changes. That's why a lot of source control system admins don't want you checking in your docs -- you eat up massive amounts of disk space, compared to the programmers' source code (text) files. If earlier versions of your docs are deliberately being removed from the repository because of space problems -- well, that pretty much defeats the whole purpose, so you need to rethink your process completely. But unless that's happening, every version of every doc you checked in should still be in the repository. HTH! Richard ------ Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-777-0436 ------
