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Friday, 30 October 2009

Source control

A big advantage of using structured authoring for me is the ability to use our existing source control system for documentation.

Source control is all about people working simultaneously on a large set of files. An SCM tool is a collaboration tool, not a software development tool. Sure, it's quite a technical one, but SCM tools have evolved to deal with enormous codebases, and thousands of developers working on the same product.

As a software company, our developers work in source control all the time. A team goes off and develops a feature, and comes back, and merges the feature back into the product. That merge process is largely automatic, and once it's done, the feature gets incorporated into the product with no fuss.

I can do exactly the same for the documentation. I don't even have to be present when the feature lands: a lot of the time, the only file that conflicts is the map file, and the SCM system is smart enough to figure it out for itself.

Even if I wasn't at a software company, this idea that you can develop new features separately and easily combine them later is useful enough that I'd probably want to maintain a SCM system of my own to do it with.





* Actually, it doesn't even ask this most of the time, but if you have one file for each topic, it makes merging easier.

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