Difference Viewer / Subversion (SVN) support

[Tim Green]

Update: I've just got a report from the dev team that Help & Manual 5.11 should actually interoperate quite nicely with SVN provided you don't allow multiple checkouts in your SVN settings (i.e. don't allow multiple users to work on the same file, merging won't work). However, full compatibility also depends largely on the client you are using, since SVN is only the server, so you will need to test it carefully with your existing client before you commit. We'd be happy to look at detailed reports on individual clients, of course...

[tomas]

Regarding Tim's question.
> Does the general consensus appear to be that SubVersion is currently the most important VCS alongside Visual SourceSafe?

As far as I know, VSS is not even close to playing in that league.
We tried VSS a long time ago, but found it useless (it might have improved since though).
We use CVSNT, but are considering moving to Subversion. To my understanding Subversion is THE major VCS at present.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... l_software

[Greg Smith]

Although SVN was developed as the logical successor to CVS and is designed to overcode some of the peceived shortcomings with CVS, there are a huge number of commercial companies using CVS. CVS works very well and is extremely reliable. I would vote strongly for it to be supported as well as SVN.

Perhaps you should do a survey of the H&M customers.

[Malcolm Jacobson]

Hi Tim,

Just tried to connect to our SVN server using 5.1.1 Build 570 and it doesn't recognise it as being installed on our system. We're using TortoiseSVN version 1.5.7 as the client.

FWIW, H&M still crashes if we try to open a project that's been saved to our Team Server system.

Cheers,

Malcolm.

[Tim Green]

Hi Malcolm,

Tortoise is known to have some problems with Help & Manual. I'm not up to date on what clients have been producing good results, I'll check and post them here as soon as I have the information. I'll also see what the status is with possible support for Tortoise.

[Hayden]

Our documentation team all use (Tortoise) SVN. Switched from CVS a year ago. I hadn't heard of Visual SourceSafe, but I'm a technical writer rather than a programmer.
Help and manual support for SVN would be very nice. At the moment we have to choose between version control or multi-user editing on a shared location (without SVN, using H&M's built-in multi-user features). The conflicts can get out of control with multiple people working on a H&M project with SVN.

[Roy Henry]

Hey Tim,

Maybe you can post a survey with various options (e.g. cvs, Subversion) on the forum start page to find out how many people are using which version control software package.

[Ilkka Viinikanoja]

I'd appreciate proper Subversion support as well. However, it would also be helpful if there was an option for instance in the context menu to show the topic file in Windows Explorer. That's because the most common mistake we keep making is forgetting to add a new topic file to SVN. So if right after adding a new topic we could easily reveal the file in Windows Explorer (and therefore access TortoiseSVN), I think it would remedy the situation at least a bit.

[kurgbe]

That's because the most common mistake we keep making is forgetting to add a new topic file to SVN. So if right after adding a new topic we could easily reveal the file in Windows Explorer (and therefore access TortoiseSVN),

We are also using TortoiseSVN but we never forget to add new topic files since TortoisSVN reports the list of un-versioned files when we do a commit: we simply tick them to add and commit them to the repository.

Of course we also have to commit the (modified) project file. This can be a problem if someone else has changed it in parallel.

[Ortmann]

We would also greatly apprecciate direct Subversion support without a third-party plugin as version 1.6.3 of the PushOK tool is currently (H6M version 5.3 Build 1014) causing great problems.

[Tim Green]

We would also greatly apprecciate direct Subversion support without a third-party plugin as version 1.6.3 of the PushOK tool is currently (H6M version 5.3 Build 1014) causing great problems.

I can understand this. Our own experiments with PushOK indicate that it can be very slow as soon as a project gets beyond a certain size. We are looking into this for the future...

[Adele Bjorklund]

Hi Tim,

We are thinking of switching from VSS to Subversion. Do you know which clients work well with H&M and which ones to stay away from?

Thanks!
Adele

[Tim Green]

Hi Adele,

I'm afraid the only client we have experience with to date is PushOK, and we have several reports that this can be very slow for large projects. However, the maintenance update we are releasing soon will significantly improve the speed for large projects, and this should be particularly beneficial for clients like PushOK and older versions of VSS (prior to VSS 2005).

I'll send you a link by mail where you can pick up a beta version of the HM executable to try out. Anyone else who would like to experiment with this is more than welcome to, just drop me a line and I'll mail you the link.

[DvoraElisheva]

Could those of you who have already posted advise how best to use Tortoise SVN with H&M?

I have a client who has initially agreed to let me work with H&M, but he asked if there is version control.

Any and all suggestions for this would be greatly appreciated as I am new to version control at this level (in the past, I simply made a Help project, it was released, and then I had a backup of all source and released files. I then continued working, but could always roll back by going to the backedup version, if need be).

Dvora

[BillK]

Is there any progress on SVN support in Help & Manual?

I recently purchased H&M for our company and I'm trying to set it up with PushOK SVNSCC. I've set up my first project with version control and I got the error message:

"Warning: The PushOk Client (at least Version 1.6.3.1) is not fully compatible with the SCCAPI interface. This can lead into some strange behaviour!"

Can anyone tell me if this is normal when using PushOK?

Note that I actually installed SVNSCC 1.6.6.2, not 1.6.3.1.

Subversion 1.6.13
TortoiseSVN 1.6.11
Windows XP SP3
Help & Manual 5.4.0 Build 1201