Re: [Issue 533] New - implement reserved checkouts

On Monday, August 5, 2002, at 10:24 AM, Greg Hudson wrote:

> I doubt it. Word documents may be a much more common focus of group
> projects than source code, but developers are much more likely to adopt
> revision control tools than non-developers.

   If the system is obtuse and unfriendly to users, yes.

   My girlfriend's sister (who is 16) writes poems. I like the poems, and she was keeping them on some crappy free web hosting service, so I set her up with her own web site. She and I edit the site using DAV, because on Mac OS X, it's a filesystem, and on Windows, they have a half-assed, but still useable similar thing that she can use. No FTP this or some other manual business.

   Now, if we had the transparent SVN filesystem thing, so that I could mount an SVN repository read/write on OS X and she could edit using WebFolders, I'd replace that with SVN in a hearbeat. She won't notice much if anything, and I'll have history to refer to, etc. With better and friendlier tools, she'll appreciate SVN's features as well. It wouldn't surprise me if we got there in another couple of years.

   If it's that easy to use (and maybe even becomes easier to administer as well), I see plenty of reason for publishing houses to put their Quark and Word and Excel and whatnot documents on SVN servers to facilitate more collaborative workflow, etc.

   CVS is a developer tool because it's too painful for non-developers. SVN's use of DAV has the built-in advantage of working at least part way with tools unaware of SVN "just 'cuz" and has some real potential for much better tools for non-developers.

        -wsv

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Received on Tue Aug 6 18:40:48 2002