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RE: Handling project documentation using CVS


From: Paul Sander
Subject: RE: Handling project documentation using CVS
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 10:07:11 -0700

>--- Forwarded mail from address@hidden

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
>> Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 4:28 PM
>> To: address@hidden
>> Subject: Handling project documentation using CVS
>> 
>> 
>> Hello all, I was wondering if some of you nice people could 
>> give me some
>> feedback on an issue I've been wrestling with.
>> 
>> Besides the actual source code to a project, I also need the 
>> ability to
>> version design documentation ( and maybe other stuff, but this is my
>> immediate concern ).   By design documentation, I mean things 
>> like Visio
>> documents, with UML diagrams, etc.
>> 
>As opposed to TeX or ?roff documents, I guess.  These are
>likely to be proprietary formats best represented as binary
>files, which means that they aren't well suited for CVS.

Well, text formatters aren't usually the best design tools.

>> On one level, I have a feeling that CVS isn't the best way to handle
>> versioning these documents.  It kinda feels like using the 
>> wrong tool for
>> the job. But, on the
>> other hand, I can't think of any really, really, solid 
>> reasons why NOT to
>> do it.
>> 
>I think it would be more accurate to say that these files aren't
>the ones CVS handles best.  I think that a systems that does file
>locking better than CVS would do a little better, but nobody's
>shown me a system that works much better than CVS.

>You have to remember that automatic merging isn't going to work,
>and in general the only way to merge is to take one of the versions
>and manually recreate the changes.  This means that you want at least
>advisory locking, so that anybody starting work on such a file will
>know that there's likely to be a conflict that will require redoing
>changes.  It also means that, while you can have branches, merging
>doc changes between branches will not in general work, and so
>it would probably be necessary to redo the work when applying
>changes to more than one branch.

Automatic merges as built into CVS won't work, certainly.  If you
have suitable merge tools for your design documents, then you might
consider hacking CVS to integrate them.  There's demo code in the
form of a patch posted to this list showing what's necessary.  It's
too early to tell if that capability will be supported in the
mainstream, however.

>--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden




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