Steve [Subversion] wrote:
> Simon Large wrote:
>
>> I knew you were going to ask me that ;-)
>> /me racking brain to remember where I saw it.
>>
>> It has come up before on the list, and the answer is here, although I
>> can't say I have tried it myself.
>>
>> http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=12918
>>
>>
> That seems to work... well - sort-of at least... it is kind of ugly -
> at least with Word from Office 2003... It opens two document
> windows... and while I find "accepting changes" to be cumbersome - it
> does at least highlight the differences - hence making historical
> review possible. I've a suspicion that the macro could be tweaked -
> but with almost no experience of VBA and absolutely no experience of
> the API for Word (I assume that is the macro language) I guess I'm
> not best equipped to improve on the "working" sample.
No, nor me. I know the sample is there, but I can't pretend to know
enough to support it.
>> Well we could put the example above in. But there are zillions of
>> different applications so we haven't a hope of including them all,
>> and I don't even know where to begin finding out which are the most
>> popular. Most people using the list tend to be programmers, so if I
>> ask there the result will be skewed. This is the first time I have
>> come across anyone asking about OpenOffice.
>>
> While I agree that there are zillions of potential file formats that
> people might want to difference... in practice I suspect that only
> "textual" documents are really suited to kind of comparison and merge
> that would make it suitable for Subversioning.
Only pure text files can be merged using subversion/TSVN's built-in
tools. And by merge, I mean sort out the effect of 2 people editing the
same file at once. But Subversion does work with binary files just as
well. A Word document, and I guess an OpenOffice document are binary
files, even if they are rendered as text in a particular app. And of
course they are not the only binary files that people control in SVN. It
is, as I said, a universal versioning tool and there are people with
hundreds of MB of binary data stored in their SVN repositories. The
list below is almost certainly skewed by your own perception, and by
what you want to use SVN for. I know it is heavily used for website
source control, whether plain HTML or DreamWeaver output I have no idea.
> Given that [ntg]roff /
> latex / XML / HTML essentially have "source code" I suspect most would
> want to use the standard differncing tool supplied in Suversion -
> leaving (in perceived order of popularity) ::
>
> 1. MS Word / Openoffice Writer / Kword / AbiWord
> 2. Excel / Openoffice Calc / Kspread / Gnumeric
> 3. (Possibly) WYSYWIG html page designs such as DreamWeaver et
> al.
>
> If there were "best-practice" sample configurations for these
> applications then this would be a recall boon.
We do include sample configurations for some popular text file diff and
merge tools, because that is what most of our users are using. And those
samples have been submitted to the list by our users. If you want to
submit something for OpenOffice, then we can put it into the docs or the
FAQ.
> The reason I've been so gung-ho about OpenOffice is that I find the
> 2.0 beta's user interface favourable to all other wordprocessors I've
> tried... The comparison of documents (if you ignore the fact that I
> appear only to be able to compare two working copies from the supplied
> gui) is particularly suited to revision control and I think it would
> integrate fantastically with Subversion if a mechanism could be found
> to invoke comparisons from the command line.
Then tell the OpenOffice people that!
This is open-source, community-based development, and it works by lots
of people making small contributions, both to the software and to the
general pool of knowledge. I don't have a copy of OpenOffice or
DreamWeaver, nor do I have the time to go researching how to configure
them to work with SVN. I would hope that other people who do use them
(like yourself) would contribute what they find. As no-one else has
responded, I can only assume that no-one else has any experience with
OpenOffice and Subversion, so it looks like you are a pioneer :-)
BTW, you have more chance of prompting a response if you discuss things
on the mailing list, so I am forwarding this to the list as well. If you
don't want to subscribe, just request that people CC you in any replies.
Simon
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Received on Fri May 13 12:14:47 2005