Hi Steve
I'm quite new to Subversion and this may also be a little off subject,
but a thought occurred to me that may give you better exploitation of
Subversions strengths, so I'll throw in my 2 pennies worth.
With a binary file I think you will loose the opportunity to merge
changes, so only one person editing at a time or things go south quite
quickly, and the changes might bloat the repository a bit as the full
binary needs to be stored for each change.
What if you went over to saving files in html? Word does a reasonable
job at saving to this format (don't shoot me please, I just mean it
looks almost the same next time you open it). You loose some document
features but you gain portability in addition to the better Subversion
management features and concurrent edditing.
Regards,
Rich
Linedata Services (UK) Ltd
Registered Office: Bishopsgate Court, 4-12 Norton Folgate, London, E1 6DB
Registered in England and Wales No 3027851 VAT Reg No 778499447
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Carter [mailto:public07_at_soycarretero.com]
Sent: 15 May 2008 17:15
To: users_at_subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Working Copy On Shared Drive - Binary Files Only - Seeking a
definitive answer
Hi,
My employer has chosen to use SVN for Document Managment purposes. This
means SVN and Tortoise being used to version lots of binary files
(mostly Microsoft Office files and PDFs).
The old way we did this was to simply keep the files on a shared drive
in between major project milestones and use a clunky, proprietary
Document Management System for checkpoints at milestones.
With the switch-over we gain a revision history (woo hoo! now document
guys can be almost as civilized as developers!) and we can use a
repository URL and Revision to refer to a released document-set. So far
so good.
But what we lose is MS Office's feature whereby it tells you "This
document is currently opened by X for editing." Instead we use SVN file
locking, but since SVN allows you to steal locks, and the users are
document guys not developers, I don't have much faith in that system.
Stealable Locks + Ignorance ~= No Locks.
So we are considering the scenario where a working copy is placed on the
shared drive. Googling, and reading these archives, I see lots of
"oooh, bad idea" posts, but nothing actually substantive. The only
failure scenario I saw mentioned was where two people edit the same file
with an editor that doesn't anticipate concurrent users. Since Office
DOES anticipate this, this is not a problem.
It sounds like a bad idea to me, but there are at least two advocates
for doing this, so I would need a strong, rational argument for why not
to do it. Does anyone have a good technical reason why this won't
work? e.g. is user or host information stored in the working copy?
Thanks in advance,
Steve Carter
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-05-15 18:44:09 CEST