RE: handling of MsWord-Documents in CVS ?

[Patrick Lynch]

Good morning,

I've been reading the traffic in regard to placing Word documents under
WinCvs and CVS and I'm getting concerned.

We've just started using WinCvs in order to place our source code under
version control.

I was able to checkin and checkout some Microsoft Word documents (Test
Plans, Design and Analysis docs...). These Word documents will not be
changed regularly and the changes should be minor. Our release schedule is
about 4 per year, so at most they will be changed 4 times a year...Our work
flow will be to check out, work the documents and check in. This will be a
'straight line' tree (that is, version 1.0, 1.1..., 2.0, 2.1...), no
branches and no merges for us...

Bottom line: with this 'scenario', will WinCvs support Microsoft Word
documents stored as 'binaries'?

Thank you,
Pat


-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of
Eric Siegerman
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 2:50 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: handling of MsWord-Documents in CVS ?


On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 09:16:31AM -0400, Echlin, Michael wrote:
> The problem with binaries (and word files are binaries [...])
> [...]
> 6: hack cvs so that it uuencodes and decodes binary files on checkin and
> checkout.

This wouldn't help at all (the deltas would still be huge), and
it would probably be dangerous (you still couldn't do a
meaningful merge, but CVS might try anyway, and end up corrupting
the file).

Better would be to hack CVS so that it uses xdelta
(http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~jmacd/xdelta.html) as its
underlying storage format.  There was a thread here not too long
ago about the pros and cons of that.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea.
        - RFC 1925 (quoting an unnamed source)

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