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Re: Best Practices: Related but parallel versions

From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:03:23 -0500

Marshall Feldman wrote:
>
> >I have not used them so far, but have you checked if Externals can
> >do for you? Of course, if e.g. the core text is the same in both
> >spring and fall, with the exception that - within the very same text,
> >not in a separate file - in spring folks buy icecream and in fall a
> >Christmas tree, I doubt that externals will do that.
>
>
> Thanks for the idea, but I don't think this will work. Not only does one
> face the ice cream/Xmas tree issue, but one also faces the issue that
> entire parts of documents, programs, etc. will be similar but different.
> (In Fall for a given week we have Xmas tree, a list of ornaments, and a
> recipe for hot buttered rum, and in Spring we have ice cream one week
> and cake the next, but in both Fall and Spring we have instructions for
> upset stomachs for the weeks in question.)
>
> Essentially, the problem is a two-dimensional revision problem. The
> project evolves over time, as most SVN examples illustrate, and this is
> one dimension. The project also has parallel versions, and this is the
> other dimension.
>

You can probably maintain mostly-blank templates in your trunk with any
logos/layouts/headers/footers/styles, etc. that a new project would be
likely to share. Then you'd start a specific new project by copying the
directory containing the closest starting point into either a branch or
its own new project directory and start adding the specific content,
copying final revisions to an appropriately named tag. If the final
content is 'throwaway' once printed and doesn't need to be archived, you
may want to focus the revision control effort on maintaining the parts
you describe as 'similar' in the document templates leaving everyone on
their own to modify it to the print-once-and-forget different forms
which might not need to be committed back. If someone makes changes
that are significant enough to become a new template you could strip out
the content that would not be reused and have a new starting point.

Most word/document processing programs have the ability to include any
number of subdocuments so you can split out the reusable portions down
to whatever level you want to maintain.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell_at_gmail.com
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Received on 2008-09-03 18:02:48 CEST

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