On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 2:04 AM, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom kbl...@gmail.comwrote:
On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 16:40 +0200, W. Kaplan wrote:
Hi all,
I just recently started giving version control systems another go. I'm a
humanities grad student and not a programmer, so I assume that my needs
are a little different from those for which these tools were written.
However, the same applies for managing your whole home directory, so I
think this list is a good place to ask for opinions.
Keep in mind that if you have merge conflicts in your office files,
whether OpenOffice or MS Word, git and other version control systems are
much less likely to be able to do something sensible about merging them.
The reason we programmers can make it work is because we use text files
for everything. (Our source code is text files, our configuration files
are text files, our scholarly papers are written in LaTeX...).
From Odt article on wikipedia:
A basic OpenDocument file consists of an
XMLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLdocument that has
document as its root element. OpenDocument files can also take the format
of a ZIP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_%28file_format%29 compressed
archive containing a number of files and directories; these can contain
binary content and benefit from ZIP's lossless
compressionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compressionto
reduce file size. OpenDocument benefits from separation
of concerns http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns by
separating the content, styles, metadata and application settings into four
separate XML files.
Thanks to this push, good-ol MS has moved (unwillingly?) from doc (for which
your comments above are correct) to docx that is similarly at core xml and
hence text.
I don't expect any other synchronization system can reconcile these
files any better though.
This true today. And merging XML is not identical to merging program
sources. But is much closer to it than arbitrary binry data
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