Women in Technology

Article:		What's on Jason's Hard Drive
Subject:		Why use the revision control system?
Date:		2006-11-06 17:52:36
From:		misko
For the documents you are scanning in, how often do you really take advantage of the features Perforce gives you? I do something similar (check out the Fujitsu ScanSnap for an inexpensive 2 sided sheet feed scanner), then OCR using Acrobat. Acrobat has a catalog feature to make all pdfs searchable, or something like google desktop allows them to be searchable. I scan in all my bills (that I can't receive electronically) and then shred rather than save them in a box. But back to my real reason for writing. I do all this with just a directory hierarchy. I'm not sure what is gained by using a revision control system for things like bills, etc. that don't tend to have revisions. You get one per month and that's that. Thanks, nice to see others think the same way.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Why use the revision control system?
  2006-11-07 08:41:24  p2pvoice [View]
  
  
  Jason, this article may indeed change my life. I constanly struggle with how to organize information - what you techies call taxonomy. The beauty of your heirarchical file structure and naming convention is its simplicity. I found this aspect of article more useful to me than the fact that you use Preforce!
  
  That leads me to two questions:
  
  1. What benefits do you get from from the "revision control" aspect of Preforce?
  
  2. Is there a similar "personal document manager" that would do the job?
  
  Thank Jason.!
  (I'll be thinking of you all through the holiday season when I commit myself to organize virtually.
• Why use the revision control system?
  2006-11-07 14:52:37  Jason Hunter | [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  
  There are several reasons I've evolved my system to use a revision control system.
  
  1. First and foremost, not all files in my repository are write once. Many are, but not all (think resume.doc). Plus I store my active coding projects in the repository.
  
  2. Easy replication. Makes it easy to have copies of each file in every client. Something like a RAID or backup system doesn't help here. (The job for a RAID is to host the Perforce server.)
  
  3. I want something that works across operating systems and across decades. Revision control is well understood, reliable, prevalent, and here for the long term.
  
  -jh-