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

[Tom Rhodes]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:37:10 -0500
Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:

> 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?]

cvs ci -kb blah.doc

Then just check out the versions you want to change.  Unless
you're only interested in showing diffs.


-- 
Tom Rhodes