On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 2:04 AM, Chanoch (Ken) Bloom <kbl...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 16:40 +0200, W. Kaplan wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I just recently started giving version control systems another go. I'm a > > humanities grad student and not a programmer, so I assume that my needs > > are a little different from those for which these tools were written. > > However, the same applies for managing your whole home directory, so I > > think this list is a good place to ask for opinions. > > Keep in mind that if you have merge conflicts in your office files, > whether OpenOffice or MS Word, git and other version control systems are > much less likely to be able to do something sensible about merging them. > The reason we programmers can make it work is because we use text files > for everything. (Our source code is text files, our configuration files > are text files, our scholarly papers are written in LaTeX...). > >From Odt article on wikipedia: A basic OpenDocument file consists of an XML<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML>document that has <document> as its root element. OpenDocument files can also take the format of a ZIP <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_%28file_format%29> compressed archive containing a number of files and directories; these can contain binary content and benefit from ZIP's lossless compression<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_compression>to reduce file size. OpenDocument benefits from separation of concerns <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns> by separating the content, styles, metadata and application settings into four separate XML files. Thanks to this push, good-ol MS has moved (unwillingly?) from doc (for which your comments above are correct) to docx that is similarly at core xml and hence text. > > I don't expect any other synchronization system can reconcile these > files any better though. This true today. And merging XML is not identical to merging program sources. But is much closer to it than arbitrary binry data _______________________________________________ vcs-home mailing list vcs-home@lists.madduck.net http://lists.madduck.net/listinfo/vcs-home
