Subversion Experiment
I have been doing a fair bit of writing lately, storing the content in xml and html. I like to have a version history of any document I edit in case I decide to revert some changes.
In the past I have used RCS and perforce for this purpose in environments provided by my employer. Now I am writing at home, wanted something easy to use and inexpensive.
Last weekend I installed Subversion on my Mac, scanned the tutorial, and created a subversion repository and added my files into it. It was dead simple.
I find more convenient to use than Perforce, because I can just edit files and commit my changes. I don’t have to check files out for edit first - it knows which ones have changed and updates them. I have no idea how convenient subversion is for typical programmer tasks like merging duplicate changes, since I have a rather simple use case.
The only thing that got me with subversion is that when I added my files to the repository with svn import, the directory where they were imported from is not under version control, and if you make changes in that spot, subversion won’t recogonize them nor commit those changes to the repository. From the quickstart guide: “Note that the original /tmp/myproject directory is unchanged; Subversion is unaware of it. (In fact, you can even delete that directory if you wish.)”. This makes no sense to me at all and threw me for a loop for several minutes. It does make the workflow for the intial check-in, check-out difficult and confusing. There is probably some logic to this I don’t understand.
Its nice to be able to keep track of versions of documents without having to copy them into backup folders. I wish I had this at work for keeping track of my Word files.
I have often felt a good SCM tool like perforce or subversion would be a great addition to the average information worker (i.e. someone with an editor of some sort, like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel) to keep track of revisions to their documents. It would not be a stretch to make either tool easy enough to use for the average non-programmer. I could see a service offering to large enterprises being quite valuable and profitable.
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