Subversion questions

[eklisiewicz]

My team will be moving to a new authoring tool, possibly Flare, and definitely will be migrating to a version control system. I have a question on branching/tagging and another about external vs internal binding.

1. I am trying to understand the difference between branching and tagging. I am currently using Author-it and our versioning is managed by using variants. There is no equivalent in Flare, though I expect it can be achieved through a combination of condition tags or by using branching/tagging. Over on LinkedIn, people talk about making your changes in a branch and then merging back to the trunk. I do not see the value in doing this since my team will need to maintain separate versions and we would not want the base version in the trunk to have these changes. They would all need to live independently. Does that make any sense, or am I misunderstanding how merging works? I read a procedure over there from Nita Beck, and it sounds like you make a copy of your project to a branch folder and then work from there. I wish there was a way to just commit the changed files to a branch instead of the whole project. I guess i need remedial training.

2. My second question is about externally binding a Flare project vs using internal binding. With internally bound projects, you have a lot of convenience, but you don't have branching/tagging, and you have no way to see the entire repository. Nita, I think over on LinkedIn, it sounded like you were using TortoiseSVN in conjunction with internally bound files. How do you do that? If the files are internally bound, I don't see a way to use TortoiseSVN on those files.

In any case, any info is appreciated. I have a lot to learn.

[Nita Beck]

Sorry that I don't have a lot of time right now for a lengthy reply. I found this blog article (an oldie but goodie) very helpful in understanding conceptually the differences between a trunk, a branch, and a tag in SVN: https://betterexplained.com/articles/a- ... n-control/

Re internal or external binding, I always use Flare to do the binding (primarily for the convenience of having Flare handle *not* binding the stuff that should not be bound, such as the Analyzer, Output, and Project/Users folders). I use a separate client (in the case of SVN, TortoiseSVN) to do those things that Flare doesn't support, such as browse the entire repository.

Since you haven't get settled on the source control you'll use, I suggest you also consider Git. I've stopped using SVN myself except for some old projects and have used Git instead. MadCap Central (currently in public beta) uses Git as the foundation for its source control solution. There are also host providers such as GitHub and BitBucket. (BTW, BitBucket also can host SVN repos.)