GIT for Microsoft Access projects

Hello,

I'm Paul Hacker here in Tyler Texas.

We are looking for a software control system to keep track of our changes in software.

My question is, will GIT work with MS access forms, queries, tables, modules, etc?

Thanks for any help.

Paul (yes my last name is Hacker!!)

On Mon, 8 Jun 2015 9:45:17 -0500 <hackerp@suddenlink.net> wrote:

[...]

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Git works with files. So in principle it will work with *files* containing your MS access stuff.

But Git will consider and treat those files as opaque blobs of data. That is, you will get no "fancy diffing" like asking Git to graphically (or otherwise) show you what exact changes have been made to a particular form or query between versions X and Y of a given MS access document -- all it will be able to show you is commit messages describing those changes.

So... If you're fine with this setting, Git will work for you, but if not, it won't.

One last note: are you really sure you want an SCM/VCS tool to manage your files and not a document management system (DMS) instead? I mean stuff like Alfresco (free software by the way) and the like.

Consider also what you are specifically managing in MS Access. Are you looking for management of configuration data, like settings, properties, and such, or is this transactional or user-related. If managing environment-specific content, it may be worth storing raw SQL INSERT statements, with appropriate variable references, or export to XML/CSV, and having those in git so that the purpose for configuration-like data can be explained and diff'ed.

On 06/08/2015 09:44 PM, Konstantin Khomoutov wrote:

More importantly, you won't get any *merging*, which means you need to be careful about two developers making changes to the same file.

This is the only situation where locking (a feature that is inherently at odds with the idea of a *distributed* VCS) is useful.

Just because Git allows distributed workflows, doesn't mean we should only focus on being distributed IMHO.

The question for content not being mergable easily pops up all the time. (Game/Graphics designers, documents, all this binary stuff, where there is no good merge driver).

I could imagine a "git lock" command which looks like this:

    git config lock.centralServer origin
    git config lock.defaultBranch master

    git lock add [branch]  [--] <path/to/file>
    git lock remove [branch] [--] <path/to/file>
    git lock ls [<branch>]

And the way this is implemented is roughly (unoptimized, just showing how you would achieve this with todays command set):

    git fetch --depth=1 $(git config --get lock.centralServer) refs/locks/$(git config --get lock.defaultBranch)
    git checkout refs/locks/$(git config --get lock.centralServer)/$(git config --get lock.defaultBranch)
    switch(option) {
    case add:
        if exist <path/to/file>
            return -1
        else
            echo $(git config --get user.name) $(date) > <path/to/file>
            git add <path/to/file> && git commit "add new lock"
        fi
    case remove:
        if exist <path/to/file>
            # todo: check if the same user locked it before
            rm  <path/to/file>
        else
            return -1
        fi
    case ls:
        ls -R .
    }
    git push $(git config --get lock.centralServer) refs/locks/$(git config --get lock.defaultBranch)
    git <restore working tree, branch>

That said you could just manipulate the git objects directly, no need to check out to the working dir.

The server would only need to allow pushes to a refs/locks directory and be done. the client side would need to have a plumbing command, so you could easily integrate a git locking to your application if you don't want to provide a merge driver.

Thanks, Stefan

Thanks folks, I am digesting all you have said.

Now the command line I can do (I'm a programmer) but the secretary here I doubt.

So is there at GUI interface for this? Does it work on Windows systems?

Thanks,

Paul ---- Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> wrote:

On Tue, 9 Jun 2015 13:21:44 -0500 <hackerp@suddenlink.net> wrote:

That's why I asked whether the thing you do really want is a document management system, not a version control system.

Yes, Git works on Windows thanks to folks behind the Git for Windows project (often and errorneously called "msysGit" in the internets) and yes there do exist mature Windows GUI front-ends to it, with TortoiseGit and Git Extensions being supposedly the most visible picks.

But there's such thing as an irreducible complexity: while these tools strive to be user-friendly, and TortoiseGit even tries to make you think you're using Subversion rather than Git, they won't hide all the underlying complexity of a DVCS tool, which Git is, from the user.

So... I bet for your random user, it would be much easier to switch to the browser window and upload another version of their document there, with a short note describing what they do and why. This is how a typical DMS works. You won't get all that awesomness Git gives you to fiddle with your source code files but in return you'll get a system which requires next to zero training for any layman to use it.

Please rememeber about [1]. Many of the statements that post does are outdated but its essense remains to be true when it comes to handing off Git to users not possessing ninja-level computer skills. I especially recommend to think through this particular passage:

| They often struggle to use version control at all; are you now going
| to teach them the difference between “pull” and “update”, between
| “commit” and “push”? Look me in the eyes and say that with a straight
| face.

I also wonder how do you intend to explain them why they can't push because someone else had just did that, and what to do about this, and why. (And whose version should win, in the end, as the files you intend to work with are not subject for merging in the usual sense of this word -- when it comes to plain text files.)

1. http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=79

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 11:21 AM,  <hackerp@suddenlink.net> wrote:

I did not intend to answer your original question, but to start a discussion on the feasibility of a dedicated "git lock" command.

There are lots of things which are checked in alongside the code (The code is which is why you want to use Git in the first place), such as Graphics, CAD, design documents (maybe in binary format such as ODF, MS Excel).

All I did was proposing a new command and laying out its behavior. By being careful at what to use as the porcelain command line and what to use as a stable plumbing command, other programs could rely on that. (Some proprietary CAD tools such as Altium have a subversion integration [1], maybe Git wants to offer an easy interface to allow for Git integration as easily?)

As all I was saying is dreaming out new concepts, there is currently no code.

[1] http://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Version+Control+and+Altium+Designer

On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 10:19:43AM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:

You do know that gitolite has locking functionality?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com> wrote:

Yes, and it's cooking its own thing, it's not upstream (in git core I mean)

Locking is useful not just when using gitolite, but any hosting solution I believe.

Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com> writes:

I do not think that would be very useful nor even be a good starting point, even though I think it is a good tangent to think about how to improve the support for the centralized workflow.

You cannot afford to force clients keep polling the central server for the refs/locks/my-branch, if you want a good "everybody relies on central-server to coordinate" workflow experience.

And even without "file locking", once you start assuming "everybody relies on central-server to coordinate" workflow (which is common in corporate settings), you would be better off introducing a mechanism to push notification from the server side to the clients to improve support for other things, like "the client watches these branches, doing a hanging Get or whatever, waiting for the server to notify" anyway. The kind of notification that distributed use of Git can do without.

And once that kind of mechanism is there, "the client is notified not to touch these paths on this branch", "the client is notified that it is now OK to touch these paths on this branch after updating", etc., would be a natural addition.

I highly doubt that exchanging data via the "git fetch" and "git push" will be a good vehicle to implement such an async notification mechanism.

might contain good thoughts about locking + git:

Jan 12, 2010 Interest in locking mechanism? http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Interest-in-locking-mechanism-td4293383.html

Jul 04, 2013 intend-to-edit flag http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/intend-to-edit-flag-tp7591127.html

Sep 17, 2013 Locking files / git http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Locking-files-git-tp7596435.html