On 1/25/06, Sean Gilligan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Noel J. Bergman wrote: > > > I believe that Ted's already noted that we wouldn't be able to track the > > actual content changes in source control. Instead, we would have binary > > files being totally replaced, since SVN wouldn't see the content inside the > > ZIP file. > > My understanding is that the zip file contains several XML files inside > it. One is content, one is stylesheet(s), another is settings, etc. > > Perhaps there is a(n) (existing) process that can be used to > (automatically) zip/unzip before/after checking in?
That would be a step in the right direction, but in the case of the OO XML format, it seems to stores everything as a single line, which would probably make the diff and change log useless, unless the proposed process also wrapped the lines. It would be ~slightly~ more work for the maintainers, but a similar compromise would be to check in a companion file in an alternate format, via Save As. The editor supports several likely formats, including DocBook, but the most change-log-friendly format would be HTML. The OO HTML format wraps lines and also exports images, so that we would not have any content trapped in a binary format. I'm not suggesting that we maintain the content in HTML. We could continue to use and checkin the OO document. We would simply Save As and check-in the HTML version too, so that SVN can post a useful change log. Put another way, we would also check-in the the OO format as a convenience to the maintainers. :) The Save-As compromise would not address the issue of requiring the maintainers to use a specific tool, but at least changes to the documentation would not be opaque or be extra work to ascertain. Only the maintainers would need to use the tool. Individuals simply observing the project can watch the email alerts for changes to content, using the email client of their choice. Albeit, since the editor is free, open source, and multi-platform, expecting maintainers to use this tool is not much different than expecting committers to use Subversion, or Ant, or Maven, or Forrest, or Java, or any of the other free tools that we use. -Ted.
