From: Sitaram Chamarty <sitaramc@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 13:25:11 GMT
Subject: Re: In search of a version control system
Message-ID: <CAMK1S_hz-N-5mJ3OOOXbsQ5V+EjpFBmM9WFHJ_p2cxLDhVf8Ow@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAM9Z-nnQjhehJEpyhyTY=rsK_f=2gTOUMVTycn7-Lao8Gog0pA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Drew Northup <n1xim.email@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 1:58 AM, Matthieu Moy
> <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> wrote:
>> David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I would advise against the file locking, though. You ain't gonna need
>>> it ;-)
>>
>> What do you suggest to merge Word files?
>
> If the files are in the DOCX format you can just expand them as zip
> archives and diff what's inside of them. The text in particular is
> stored as XML.

You also need a merge driver that at least splits the "all in one
single very very long line" XML into different lines in some way.  I
don't think git can merge even text files if everything is on one line
in each file.  And even if you do this I don't think the result will
be a valid ODT etc file.

All in all, I prefer the locking that David mentioned [1].  And if
your users cannot be trained to check first (as that URL describes),
then you probably have to use a CVCS that supports some stronger form
of locking.

[1]: http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/locking.html