Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier... 2009/1/30 Matt Mullenweg <[email protected]>: > Mike Little wrote: >> > >> Which brings me to a second problem. Subversion does not to my >> knowledge diff xml files as xml files. That is, it does not understand >> the semantics of an xml file structure. It treats them as ascii >> records (lines) and that doesn't work for structured files. I am not >> aware of a third party add-on that will do the job either (subversion >> supports pluggable diff engines). At least not an open source one. > > I'm not sure what's the matter with this, any different than using > Subversion to manage a HTML file. Why does the diff engine need to be aware > of the markup language? >
In my experience, the main problem is when you have XML structured files with a large element that is wrapped by the XML editor across say, 30 lines. If you change a single word at the beginiing of that element, the whole element gets re-wrapped. As far as Subversion is concerned, it will see 30 changed lines instead one changed element. When you get a large number of these, it can be tiresome to see what has really changed. When you add in the idea of multiple people editing the same resource, where someone might change a single word at the opposite end of the same element. Subversion in that case would likely show a conflict for every line of that element whereas, the change ought to be easy to merge. When the XML files are the size of those in the subversion book, I would imagine that it would quickly become an impossible task to use subversion to manage changes XML files in the same way you would manage code changes. It is quite a while since I tried to manage structured documents in this way, so it may be that things have improved. mIKE -- Mike Little http://zed1.com/ _______________________________________________ wp-docs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-docs
