[p4] Integrating Perforce with RoboHelp

[Russell Jackson]

In this case, I would check the files in with the +l modifier, set their
clients to the revertunchanged option, and then tell the users to check out
the whole directory when they wanted to work on the help system. With these
options in place, the work is done for them, and they don't have to fool
with .zip files, and Perforce only updates the files that actually changed.

This is just my 2 cents, everyone is entitled to do it the way that makes
them most comfortable of course.

Rusty

On 4/18/07, Qazwart <qazwart at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>


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RCJackson Consulting
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