Version Control for non Programmers

[Ted Gould]

Carl Parrish wrote:
> Anyone know of any docs on version control for non programmers? I'm 
> trying to get my wife to use subversion for all her business docs. so 
> far its too much for her. its too many extra steps. Any ideas on 
> automating some of the steps (esp. typing in her ssh passwd) would be 
> helpful. I'm looking now to see if anyone has a plug in for openoffice 
> to work with subversion. Perhaps my biggest mistake was trying to get 
> her to do it from the command line. But I don't know any of the GUI 
> clients so if anyone has a preferred GUI for Linux please let me know. 
> She's been working with Linux exclusively for about 3 years but doesn't 
> want something that will "get in her way" while creating docs. All the 
> books I have on Subversion and CVS have too much code in the examples.

Well, like everyone else, I don't seem to have a good answer for that. 
The only place that I've seen non-computer people use version control is 
with CMSes.  But, most of those are a little more painful than she's 
probably interested in.

One thing you could try if she wants "no interruption" would be to just 
set a cron job to run every 5 minutes to check everything in.  You'd 
still get the data versioned over time, but you wouldn't have as useful 
of comments.  Remember you'll also have to do a status to find files 
that need to be added.

If you wanted to be really slick you could use inotify and make a pretty 
cool program to do this automatically when the file is saved :)  Heck, 
if you created it as an applet, then it could pop up a dialog also to 
get a comment.  That might be a really cool solution.

		--Ted