Git or Subversion - decisions, decisions!

[iand]

At my company we are considering using a free source control system with Flare and wondering whether to go for GIT or subversion, can anyone advise>
What are the advantages/disadvantages? Is one faster than the other?

I know this has already been discussed but the topic is a little out of date so the advice may have changed. Git is currently used extensively in our company so we are tempted to go with Git. However, the native Fare integration offered by Subversion looks very useful and I think it could save a lot of time and mistakes. Obviously it would be nice to bind the documentation with the software in the version control system, but this is not essential.

Has anyone used git-svn to keep git and subversion repositories in sync? This might allow us to have the best of both worlds. Alternatively, would the PushOK git plugin help?
I am happy to setup a subversion server on a linux box so setup difficulty doesn't really enter into the equation.
Any word on when Madcap will finally add Git integration? I'm slightly jealous that Perforce support got added first!
Thanks for your help
Ian

[beelia]

At my company we are now using Git, but at the file level. I'm finally comfortable with it, but it is not easy to implement with Flare. You have to keep track of all the files you're changing to do it right.

I was going to try the PushOK CVS SCC plug-in, but it's a Russian product, and the site is so clumsy that I have the willies about implementing it within my company. I spent years documenting security products, and it just seems like a desperation move we don't need at this time. Plus I now see another comment in this forum that it is "broken", so we're at a dead end.

So it's back to command-line Git. I put in a feature request and am hoping it gets integrated into Flare 11.

Bee

[iand]

Thanks Bee, I'm tilting towards subversion at the moment, because the integration just seems to make everything a lot easier, but it's good to know others are having success with Git. Were you able to setup .gitignore successfully? I am able to ignore one output directory but not multiple output directories.
Thanks for your help
Ian

[beelia]

We didn't add multiple output directories. Our .gitignore is very simple:

Analyzer/
FileSunc/
Output/
Reports/
Users/

Success is relative. Our individual repos and origin/master remote repositories work fine, but integration with Flare would make it so much easier. We don't do daily commits, only when something significant changes in our documents.

But it was the same problem for me as the years I spent with Perforce - just a lot of CLI manual work. As in my last job, the developers select and manage the source code control system, and we figure out how to work with it whether our authoring tools support it or not. Git is clearly the best sccs now, but it presents real challenges to Madcap users because of the required "third party" configuration, which is clearly unsuitable for enterprise work.

I put in a Madcap feature request for Perforce in 2007, and it just made it into Flare 10. I hope it's not going to be another 7 years before Git is supported.

Bee

[angelabartz]

Mac + VM + Flare + Git+SSH + SourceTree … no problems. (Not that I had a choice )

I’m on a Mac with a VM. My Flare source is in a shared folder, and that folder includes all the checkin files. Our repositories here are git (+ssh). I use SourceTree (free) to check the files in and out. The setup was really simple. Ignoring folders and files is also easy. SourceTree includes an intuitive Web UI, and I have no problem branching and checking in to either master or a branch or both.

One caveat is that I’m the lone writer here. I don’t know how well SourceTree handles situations where multiple users might try to access the same file. I imagine there would be some kind of warning, or something in the UI that indicates that a file is checked out, but I can’t be certain.

[iand]

Hi Angela, thanks for the tip about sourcetree, just tried it out and it looks pretty good. We are a new team of three technical writers of which two are new to Flare so the multi-author scenario is something we need to consider. Do you share GIT with the developers? Are there any issues with checking in lots of image files? Do you use any tools to help view differences between files. It seems quite hard to work out what has changed in Sourcetree as all the xhtml syntax gets in the way whereas Flare's visual diff feature is really nice. Is there anything else we lose by not using integrated source control?
Thanks
Ian

[angelabartz]

Ian,
I do not share Git with developers. I have two repositories: one for source, and one for output. The developers have a script that pulls my docs from the output repository. I don't have a lot of image files, but I have a lot of MathML, and each equation is converted to a PNG file in the HTML5 output. I have not had any trouble checking files in or out. Hmm. I also don't have any trouble viewing diffs in SourceTree. I just select the checkin that I want to review. This shows me a list of the files that were checked in. Then I select the file that I want to examine. The diff editor shows me all the changes that were made to that file as a result of that specific checkin. I've never had to select a file and try to see how that file has changed through every checkin, though.

Keep in mind that there are other Git tools out there. Maybe one of these will work better for you. Check out http://git-scm.com/downloads/guis.

Regarding whether you lose anything without integrating, I've never used SVN or any other Flare integrated tool, so I can't comment. I have used the Perforce plugin in a previous life. For that, I suggest using the 32-bit version of Perforce. The plugin is only available as 32-bit, and my teammates who used the 64-bit version of Perforce with the 32-bit plugin experienced issues that I and one other writer never encountered. We were both on the 32-bit version of Perforce. I suppose our lack of issues could have been a happy coincidence.

[iand]

Hi Angela, apologies for the slow reply. That sounds a good setup. I'll check out the other git tools at the link you provided.
Thanks
Ian