[p4] Integrating Perforce with RoboHelp

[Qazwart]

On Apr 18, 2007, at 9:54 PM, Russell Jackson wrote:
> I would actually recommend against this for any program, and the  
> reason is that the .zip file might be a very large file, and if you  
> change one single file it, you now have to check in the whole thing  
> again to update that file. It is much preferred to check in the  
> individual files just like you would with regular source code.

It all depends how the system saves its files, whether or not you  
have some control over them. You'd be right if RoboHelp was merely  
generating a basic text-based HTML help system, but in many of these  
help documenting systems, the files generated are not plain text  
files, you have no real control over the file names, and a minor  
change in one part of the help system causes all the files to be  
changed.

You could write a script to either mark all files for edit before you  
begin (probably a good idea since you probably want to lock them  
since they cannot be merged anyway), or setup the files in such a way  
that they are all writable even if they are not opened for edit.  
Then, after you finish your work, you have to figure out which ones  
really changed, which ones are new files, and which files are no  
longer needed, and submit all these changes.

But, in the end, you're adding a lot of complexity, and are not  
saving that much room over just zipping the files into one archived  
file and just checking that one zipped file in and out. Remember that  
these are not developers, but tech writers who are not use to the ins  
and outs of source control and probably don't really see much need to  
store their work in Perforce. In this case, you may be better off  
keeping things simple.

--
David Weintraub
david at weintraub.name
qazwart at gmail.com