[wplug] version control for e.g. MS Word documents

[Patrick Wagstrom]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 15:16 -0500, Duncan Hutty wrote:
> I have a client who wants to have a version controlled archive for a 
> series of documents in MS Word format. Notwithstanding the fact that I 
> believe this is a bad format for all sorts of reasons, I have been 
> charged with fulfilling their desire.
> 
> At the mention of version control, I instinctively jump for subversion. 
> However, I know that svn/cvs/whatever don't do so well with 
> non-plaintext files. Presumably a very large proportion of the file's 
> data changes for even small document content changes and this makes 
> diffs difficult (and, although of lesser importance, swells the 
> repository considerably). I wonder whether anyone has any experience 
> with a version control system for Word docs. Does this not matter? Will 
> it just work?

As long as it's set to binary in the VCS, it will just work.  I throw
PDFs, pngs, all sorts of stuff at subversion all the time and it just
works.

Of course, the binary diffing usually means it just stores a new copy of
the file, causing your data set to grow fairly fast if it's a very large
document.

--Patrick