On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 08:26:59AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: > Hello, > I am looking for a tool to help me maintain a backup of a writing project. > Being a programmer my first instinct is to use something along the lines of > rcs/cvs. I was thinking of svn since I have a project on Google Code and have > the tools installed on one of the machines on which I would do a part of the > writing. However in attempting to answer this question for myself with Google > searches I ran across a message in a mailing list which said that version > controls designed for software might not be the best for documents. > > What I want is the following: steve, several have pointed out how svn would work for you, but Ron made the point that it might not work so well with .odt as they are zipped files (I think). The problem being that you won't get proper diffs between versions where you've only changes a few words. I don't really know the inner workings of the various VCS, but have a couple suggestions. 1) depending on your requirements in terms of formatting and so forth, you could save in a different file format. I think(!) without looking that the earlier versions of openoffice saves were not compressed, so you may be able to "save as" and earlier version and essentially work around that. Or you could use .rtf or .txt or whatever, again depending on whether you need support for formatting and so forth during the writing stage. 2) ISTM that it would be darn straightforward to get a VCS to handle zip files properly -- unzipping the current repo version and comparing to the new incoming version and then zipping the whole thing up. I know it doesn't help your current situation much, but once of the "still in development" VCS'es might be able to incorporate this feature right away. I'm thinking particular of Darcs which is still heavily worked on, I think, and being written in Haskell should be subject to fairly quickly adding a feature like this. Might be worth a shot. hth A
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