Is it possible to use Git for H&M projects developing?

[Andrey Bushman]

Can I use Git for H&M projects developing? It disturbs me, because each branch will have the modified version of the projectname.hmxz file, which is not a usual text file. How Git will merge such my branches? How you solve this problem in your work? I know what I can save my project as uncompressed XML. Is it a single way for possibility of Git using?

[Tim Green]

Hi Andrey,

You can use git or any other version control system passively but you should not try to do this with HMXZ projects. That would be a waste of time, because HMXZ files are compressed binaries that cannot be managed by version control at all. Instead you should use the uncompressed HMXP format. Then all the project components and every topic file are available as separate, plain-text XML files that are perfect for version control. Then the version control system can also do diffing, merging etc. You can save your project as HMXP with Save As... in the File menu.

Help & Manual has active support for Subversion and Team Foundation Server, but you can also use version control "passively" with any version control system, since all the source files are plain-text XML and Help & Manual also supports multi-user editing without the support of a VCS. To do this, you create your project in uncompressed XML format (HMXP) and load the entire project folder into your version control system's repository.

Before you start working the administrator then checks out the project to a local copy in a location where all users working on the project have access to it. Since Help & Manual supports multi-user editing directly all users can work on this local copy of the project at the same time. At the end of the working session the administrator then checks the local copy back into the source control repository.

We would strongly urge you to switch to the uncompressed XML/HMXP format for all your ongoing work, if possible. This is particularly important since you are working with network storage. HMXP is faster for large projects and also more secure. When you load an HMXZ the entire project must be unpacked into memory. With HMXP you just need to load what you are editing.

The single-file compressed HMXZ projects are convenient (and contain exactly the same folder structure as the HMXP variant) but they are a single-file compressed binary -- actually a ZIP with a different extension. If that file gets damaged, for example as a result of a network or Windows error while saving, you often can't recover anything from the damaged file. With HMXP everything is saved in plain-text XML files, with separate files for all topics, project settings, the table of contents etc. It's thus not possible for damage to a single file to have such negative results, and even if individual files are damaged you can generally recover the undamaged portions because the files are plain text.

In addition to these benefits, the HMXP format allows you to use multi-user editing and version control systems, and also makes it possible to store much larger amounts of data in the baggage files section.

[Andrey Bushman]

Yes, I read about HMXP and its advantages in the help of H&M some month ago (but not about Git using with it). I will resave my project into HMXP format and use it in Git.
Thank you!