[Techtalk] Version Control for Docs?

[nicole]

At 18:27 on Jun 1, Cynthia Kiser shook the earth with:

> Quoting nicole <colby at wsu.edu>:
>
> You don't have to check out the entire tree to work with a single
> document - though I do think it is easier to do so. I always have a
> "working copy" of everything I am doing. Since CVS doesn't lock on
> checkout like I believe VSS does, there isn't any penalty to having a
> full checkout - other than (cheap) disk space. But if you want to
> check out just one file, you can do:
>
> cvs checkout -r HEAD /repository/path/to/documentation/files/filename.doc

Thanks, it hadn't occurred to me, but I've done just that before.

I think my engineers have just been spoiled by the VSS interface -- you
browse the tree, click to download, click to check out, click to check in.
WinCVS works great if you have the entire repository, but you have to
download all of the files to get the full tree structure.

So, I guess, to refine what I want:

1) the ability to check out single files
2) the ability to download only the "tree structure" without downloading
all files in the tree

> > Something that does diffs of word documents and such would be nice, but I
> > really won't hold my breath (maybe SharePoint can do this).
>
> Word has its own version tracking stuff if you want to turn it on. But
> from CVS's point of view, it is all going to be icky binary,
> non-diff-able stuff.

Yeah, which is why we thought a Microsoft product may be able to do the
diffs -- turns out that's a big fat no also. Maybe going forward... it is
just XML right? (fat chance) :P

> I started doing my docs in DocBook and love it. 95% of what I needed
> to know was in /www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-docbk.html if
> you are interested in converting.

Thanks, I'll check it out. :o)

-nicole