On Sun, 2008-03-02 at 17:01 -0800, jan gestre wrote: > On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Tito Mari Francis Escaño > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > SVN or CVS will do. When you say " to monitor how long a > person is > working on a particular file", does it mean to monitor what > the user > does with a particular file at a particular time? > > yes, and more like what has changed since the last access.
what kind of files are you looking at? MS-Word or similar? if MS-Word or some other binary format then svn diff is not going to help you much (unless you can read the binary format by eye). you might have some luck by converting the files to text (or html or xml or something) and then doing the diff there. that, at least, could be automated. otherwise, you could have them turn on the collaboration feature (not sure what it's called in MS-Word, but it's that feature where multiple people edit the file one at a time (serially, not in parallel, although possibly parallel edits are possible now too, they weren't possible yet when i was still working with MS-Word) and each persons edits can be made visible by markup (there's a special view where you can look at all the edits, including strikeouts, new text, and text replacements). but i only mention that possibility in order to demonstrate how ugly it is, and how work intensive (there's probably a way to automate that, but you're going to need to go to a microsoft geeks mailing list for that). Spolsky discusses something along those lines in: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.html search for "Let Office do the heavy work for you." For what it's worth, there is some discussion online that that approach doesn't scale and that many people have tried it and there are huge pitfalls along the way. without reading those other discussions i could have told you the same thing :-). with anything that convoluted and with two decades of hacks in the file formats, there are going to be huge pitfalls in everyone's way. > Would you need an hourly account/record of what > happens/changes to a file were done as > those were accessed? > > not necessarily on an hour basis, basically we want to monitor their > production efficiency. svn could not help you if you wanted hourly or some other period. svn can only note changes if the file has been committed. if the program creating the files edits the file in place then you could have a process committing the (often incomplete) files regularly. if the program creating the files uses temporary files then you could svn add;svn commit the temp files, but that won't help that much since you'd then need to associate the temp files with the original file. probably not worth the effort. tiger _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
