Re: Subversion vs CVS for document files

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 10:02 -0500, Eric wrote:

> It is a problem if you're working with people who are absolutely convinced
> that it brings no benefit, and whose minds can't be changed.
>
> I can say "I can check out a complete set of files at rev X and I'm
> guaranteed that the spec matches the design matches the code matches the
> tests" and I hear "Yeah, yeah, you can do the same thing with VSS with
> tags" or some such.
>
> Never mind that it takes extra steps with VSS or CVS or most other VCSs,
> and you get it automatically with SVN.

I think the trick is to completely ignore the ambiguous 'repository'
revision number (ambiguous because any number of them might refer to
an unchanged file) and only ever refer to the one that 'svn info
filename' gives you for that particular file. Viewvc seems to do
the right thing in this respect and might be the right thing to use
for people's first exposure to the system.

> There are still document files, though, where it makes no sense to try to
> tie them to other files in a repository (e.g. company policies and
> procedures, correspondence, etc.) and it remains cumbersome to put each of
> them in its own repository.

Even if you don't make a repository per file you have to at least make
a directory per file or per group that you want to make the minimal
checkout set since there is no way check out less than a complete
directory. But, for people who just want read access for editorial
input, viewvc might be a good approach again.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell@gmail.com
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