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On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, "Bill Swallow" <wswallow -at- nycap -dot- rr -dot- com> wrote:
> (attribution eaten by snakes)
> : Have any of you used MS Visual SourceSafe for document version
> : control? Do you recommend it? Any problems?
> Yes. No. Yes. (In that order.)
> VSS does not work well with binaries. The system "works", but all it
> does is store additional copies of the file you're checking back in.
> So, if you have a 5MB file you edit and check in 5 times, you have now
> chewed up 25MB of space to store the revision history of that file.
That's a known limitation of VSS. The solution is: (suprise suprise)
don't store binaries. Assuming W2K/O2K, download Microsoft Office 2000
HTML Filter <http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/Msohtmf2.aspx>
and the W3C's 'tidy' <http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/>, 'Export as
Compact HTML' and pipe through tidy before checking in. The files will be
standards-compliant HTML and diff & pin like any other source. For
solutions other than W2K/O2K, do something else that preserves most of the
formatting of the document but spits out a text file.
> : What other programs do you recommend for storage and distribution of
> : documentation files?
> Documentum. I've never used it, but from what I've heard from a variety
> of sources, I'm sold on it (shold I ever have the budget for it).
I'm currently in the process of building a twiki box on top of
debian/apache/CVS. I'll keep the list updated if I have any problems.
...or any ~more~ problems, I should say. The stock debian kernel didn't
include agpgart, so it didn't see the onboard video in the Dell. One
kernel recompile later, and everybody is happy.
> : Is a company-wide license required just for Read access?
> I don't know. I don't think so. But I do think corporate or volume
> pricing is an option.
My budget went from $3000 to $1000 to "we'll give you this EOLed PC",
which is why I'm going with the open source solution. If I had budget,
this box would be W2K/IIS/SQLServer/VSS/Sharepoint, but I wouldn't have
to admin the damn thing, which counts for a lot. As it stands, I probably
have a more robust solution for no money, but it's eaten up some of my
time setting it up already, and I haven't migrated all of the stuff onto
it yet, and I'll be 'the guy' responsible for patching and security audits
and administrative stuff and and and...
Although most of my professional experience is as a net admin, I was hired
to be a technical writer, and the resume I was hired from said specifically
"not a coder". Six months later, I have the full suite of dev tools on my
machine. Another six months later, I get root on a production server. *sigh*
--
Huey
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