We have a group at work that is responsible for editing our books. The source documents for these books are in Adobe FrameMaker, with a few Word documents and many images (TIFF, EPS, etc). For a few years now we’ve been storing these on a WebDAV server and using FrameMaker’s built in WebDAV support. This worked okay, but wasn’t revision control at all.
After lots of discussion about revision control software and Subversion specifically, we finally pulled the trigger and started moving over books from the WebDAV server to the a new Subversion repository. To start with we only did a small set of data, to get the editors used to using Subversion. I should say, getting used to using TortoiseSVN, because that is what they are all using. If you are a Windows user and need/want to use Subversion, I strongly recommend using TortoiseSVN. It makes so many things easy for the regular Windows user.
It was really great to see how quickly the editors took to Subversion/TortoiseSVN. These are computer users in the truest sense. They are not programmers or system administrators (the kind of folks you normally associate with revision control software). Since the migration of the first book I’ve moved some additional support material and two other books. Eventually the remaining 17 books and supporting files (lots of other files) will move over as well. To minimize the impact on updating the repository I import no more than one book per day.
Even though the conversion isn’t complete yet, I’m prepared to call this a success. The users have been so happy with Subversion/TortoiseSVN that they’d hang me at the suggestion of going back. It has been immensely satisfying to see this group of editors take to this so quickly.
Here are the numbers as they stand right now. The Subversion repository is just over 1.5GB. A working copy of the repository comes in at about 6GB. Based on the size of the remaining files in WebDAV, I expect that a working copy could grow by more that 35GB.
A brief note about branches and tags. Because these are books and work on them really only goes linearly, we’ve decided to not use branches at all. We will be making use of tags a fair bit though. We are still pinning down all of the milestones that will require a tag, but the obvious ones will likely be editions and printings of each book.
UPDATE : I forgot to mention some other numbers about the Subversion repository. Revision 1 was committed by me on 29 Nov 2006 @ 11:57am. Looking at the commit log right now we are at revision 414 as of 04 Jan 2007 @ 8:30am. Those editors have been busy 🙂