Re: Source control/CVS software

["Jeremy H. Griffith" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 10 May 2005 09:34:57 +0200, "Gier, Thomas" 
<Thomas.Gier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>we're using CVS as well. The major drawback in my opinion is, 
>that every time you check in some changes the entire binary 
>file is copied to the Server. We work on about 15 handbooks 
>in 8 languages and our source control archives for the current 
>version are something around 300GB. 

We noticed increasing size even when committing to CVS as MIF.
This was especially true of generated files, the IX particularly.
You might think the solution is just to skip those, but then
you lose the ref-page info needed to regenerate them, unless
you have those ref pages in a template that you do commit.

Then too, resolving "conflicts" with MIF files is not trivial.
It's easier with C++ program source; for MIF, you need to know
the format intimately to have any chance of correct resolution.
You can't just view the differences in Frame, as you can with
Frame's own doc-comparison tool.  God help you if you misplace
an angle bracket.  ;-)

Our final solution has been just to archive .zips of the .fm
file set for each release, but if you have more than one TW
working on the same doc at the same time, this is not ideal... 

>A workaround would be to save as *.mif and put this into your 
>source control. I think some time ago I've read something here 
>on the list about a way to tell FrameMaker to always save as MIF ...

I don't know of such a method, but when we were using CVS for
MIF we added support for that to Mif2Go, using MIF as the
output format.  There were several steps we found necessary
that were best done by a plugin.  We wanted to save MIF that
could be updated from CVS and used directly in the same book.
Unfortunately, if you SaveAs to a different directory in Frame,
all links are helpfully changed to point back at the original
locations.  If you put this file back into the directory you
work in, all links are broken.  So what we did was to save
the Frame files (including the book file) in the current dir,
so links are unaltered.  We used a temp extension there, then
moved the files to the real destination and renamed them .fm.
That way we could bring an archived file back in, and Frame
would read it without complaint as MIF, but resave as real .fm
binary, just what we wanted.  And archive with a few clicks.

The CVS client we use is Tortoise CVS, which can be used as a
shell extension.  It's by far the easiest CVS client we've
ever used:
  http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
We're also looking into Subversion... mainly for C++, but if
that works well, possibly for MIF too.

If this workflow fits your needs, you are welcome to use the 
demo version of Mif2Go for it, even commercially:
  http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm
We do *not* alter the output files in any way for this format, 
so the demo version is just as usable as the registered one 
for this purpose.  And we're happy to share it with the Frame
community.  ;-)

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>  http://www.omsys.com/

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