atw: Re: Even more file pafs
- From: Hedley Finger <hfinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:33:16 +1000
Matthew wrote:
Bottom line - if you are teaching your students to save their
documents in one central location - fantastic. If you are
teaching them to categorise their files in folders and sub-folders
in that location, they will be streets ahead of the average
And if they are using a version management system to lock files to
ensure there
are no overwrites when someone treads on someone else's changes, they
will be
in nirvana and their price beyond jewels. TortoiseSVN** plus Subversion
is a
production-quality open-source VMS that is free and easy to learn.
I repeat myself from a few days ago ...
What is the KEY skill requirement for all technical communications jobs
X** (pshaw! wash yer mouf out!)? No, it's not that. A damn good
haranguing? Not that either. An ability to use regexps? Not this
time round.
No, it's version management ... ta-da!
Are you writing the Great Australian Novel? Ghosting Peter Costello's
second book? Propounding a 10,000 page rebuttal to the necessity of
X**? Then you need to be able to be able to recover that file that
Windows/Mac OSX/Word/OpenOffice.org just trashed. Or, to roll back to
an earlier version which was actually better than the most recent draft.
Because you will almost certainly have to use Rational ClearCase,
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Perforce, CVS, or one of the many other
version management systems (VMSs) around. And if you have some
private projects where it is important to be able to have good
back-up, then you can do no worse than get your hands on Subversion
and TortoiseSVN** (Google is your friend). That way, you can learn
the principles of version management and impress your new client or
employer at how quick you are on the up-take when learning one of the
industry VMSs.
TortoiseSVN works within Windows Explorer and all operations on files
and folders are done by right-clicking on them and selecting the
appropriate operation from the context menu. As long as you remember
that all operations such as deleting or renaming a file or folder MUST
be done with the TortoiseSVN commands -- NOT the Windows Explorer
equivalents -- you will find TSVN very easy to learn and use.
Suppose you are going hell-for-leather to get a documentation set out
for BloatApp 3.0 while your colleague is to start work on the set for
BloatApp 4.0. Simple, just branch the fileset and work in parallel
until the BloatApp 3.0 documentation is finished, label a release
milestone, and merge the BloatApp 3.0 and 4.0 branches together into
the mainline. Course, the files will need to be in plain text so that
they can be diffed and merged, or conflicts viewed and resolved. X**
would be an obvious contender ...
But you can still store all your binary files -- Word, FrameMaker,
PNG, JPEG, etc. -- and version them by locking them, although you
can't branch. There is a nifty diffing tool for graphics which shows
each graphic half-transparent on a white background. Where they are
identical, the details of lines, shades, and text appear full
strength. Where they differ the details are faded.
So there you are, an absolute requirement for all technical writers
even it the client or employer does not specify it. Because it can
save your hide when you have totally managed to stuff up a project.
So don't even think of all that X** malarkey -- version management is
your man.
TortoiseSVN plus Subversion can be used on a local drive, network drive,
or remote computer via the svn:// protocol or the svn+ssh:// secure
protocol. You can set up a server on your own machine and access your
project via svn://localhost/myProject/, a good way to learn how a remote
server VSM works. Many X** editors have a GUI client built in (e.g.
Eclipse and the many IDEs such as Aptana web IDE that are built on it).
Regards,
Hedley
** TortoiseSVN is a Windows-only GUI, unfortunately.
--
Hedley Finger
28 Regent Street Camberwell VIC 3124 Australia
Tel. +61 3 9809 1229 Fax. (call phone first)
Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558
Email. "Hedley Finger" <hfinger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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