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

[Bill Moran]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:30:05 -0500
Duncan Hutty <dhutty+wplug at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:

> Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 15:16 -0500, Duncan Hutty wrote:
> >   
> <snip>
> > 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.
> >   
> I understand that it will _work_, but I wonder whether it will actually 
> be useful. For example, how do you determine how far to go back if you 
> want to  go back to a previous version? Do you rely on good commit 
> messages?

Yes, you're going to need good commit messages, as the diff information
that svn would give you would be junk to most anyone except Bill Gates.

However, my understanding is that svn _does_ handle "binary" diffs
gracefully, as in it recognizes the file is binary and actually stores
_just_ the changes, thus not filling up your repository too quickly.
I would assume it's using bindiff or hexdiff, but I don't know.

[Actually, I have a complaint to the OOo people about this, since OOo
_always_ compresses files when saving.  Since they're just XML, a VCS
would be very useful if I could convince OOo to save docs uncompressed.
As a result, I've resorted to saving my fiction as ASCII text ... Yes,
I keep my scifi writing in subversion - don't you?]

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.