RE: cvswrappers - any better suggestions ?

[Echlin, Michael]

I know I am getting into this one about an eon to late but here's my 2 cents
worth.

We are a company that while we do create code wew normally create documents.
Our current use of CM tools in various projects and divisions is all over
the mapo from tools that cost tens of thousands a seat to rcs and cvs for
free. In any one project you will find one tool in use because using more
then one is just a waste of time. So we want a tool that can handle our code
well and also our documents well. Unfortuantly the documents are in the
company standard word processor and so are binary. One of the current CM
tools handles binary files way different them it handles text files. 
There are problems with binary files in cm. when you start adding many
revisions to an archive you get an archive file that suddenly becomes very
large, with some documents having a size of 6 to 20 megs even 10 revisions
is a large file to hunt through to get at the particular version of the
document, and with our particular industry the documents are live for the
life of the system they describe and that life expectancy is 40 years. This
soon makes management of this file very hard due to file size. 
This tool does things a little different. It creates an archive for the
document by creating a sub-directory (only for binary, for text it uses the
same old RCS file) and keeps each copy of the file there individually the
name of the file being stored with each rev stored with the number (1.1) as
the name of that version of the file, and keeps the ,v file where it always
has been, but this file contains everything else about the file such as log
history, ...

I think this might be a good adition to the way cvs handles binary files.
That and let me specify what program I will use to show the diff of that
type of file. (Word does diffs of word files, excel does diffs of excel
files...)

Mike.

-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander Kamilewicz [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: April 6, 2001 10:39 AM
To: David H. Thornley
Cc: CVS-II Discussion Mailing List
Subject: Re: cvswrappers - any better suggestions ?


"David H. Thornley" wrote:
> 
> Here's the situation I'm looking at.
> 
> We do most of our work in conventional programming languages like
> C++ and Java and Perl, and these work very well with CVS. We use
> HTML for some documentation, and that generally works well
> (although I have little experience with CVS storing the abominations
> you get when saving as HTML from Word).  We have things like
> release branches and patch branches.  What this means is that
> CVS works very well for most of the stuff we do.
> 
> On the other hand, there is stuff mixed in there that is not
> source code.  One example would be image files for the HTML.
> These files are most conveniently located in the same directory
> as the HTML files, and in some cases source files.

This is very similar to my environment, although as well as images we
have lots of .mov, .fla, .swf, .doc, .xls, & assorted binary files.

> This means that we have three choices.
> 
> 1.  Continue to use CVS, accepting the problems with binary files.
> 2.  Use a combination of CVS and some other system that handles
> binary files better.
> 3.  Switch to another tool entirely.

We do #1.  The only problem with #1 is that you're going to have a
repository that grows rather rapidly.  We realized that and invested in
a Network Appliance.  My repository is now 33Gb large.

However, since the bulk of our problems with binary files is:  "Here's a
new version of that image/movie/flash/whatever, have fun" we decided
that it would be pointless, at this point, to move to another SCM tool
when CVS fits so well into the toolkit of the developers doing the .htm,
.jsp, and .js files.

I think it's worth noting that one of the pre-eminent SCM tools for
version control/management of images/flash/movies, called MediaWay,
doesn't store "diffs" but stores a copy of every version of every
element ever entered into and/or modified in its repository.

That's basically what CVS does.  So CVS isn't particularly far away from
that functionality.

If you have a need for a tool that provides more and better information
on complex binary files (images/flashes/movies), then you can do what we
do.  Buy MediaWay, have the graphics dudes use it, and use cvs import
when they have new versions.

It works OK for us.

Alex

_______________________________________________
Info-cvs mailing list
address@hidden
http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-cvs