Ever have a dream about something that's so mundane, you're not sure whether you dreamed it or not?
When you work with RoboHELP, you don't just work with just one file at a time. You need to have the whole directory. The project directories are pretty big. Since there are multiple writers working on this release, and we're scattered over six or seven states, the source files are kept on the network. When we need to work on something, we need to grab the whole directory and download it over a very slow connection. (We can zip it on the network first and then download the much smaller zip file, but even that takes a very long time.) If you're working from home, there's also a very moody VPN client involved.
To save time, we typically download each directory only once. After that, we copy only the changed files back and forth to keep our local copies in synch with whatever's on the network. This is a bit tricky for a lot of reasons (for example, if you change just the name of a file, its modification date doesn't get updated; and a changed filename can wreak havoc with a help project).
This goofy directory thing and the slow download times are why we can't use a regular document control system to prevent problems. RoboHELP actually has a pretty good document control system, but it's meant for a small LAN, not the multi-state monstrosity we use.
Anyway, I had a dream last night that when I was carefully comparing directories, I discovered that sorting by the date column didn't work. It mostly worked, but certain types of files simply weren't getting sorted, and were just showing up wherever they wanted to.
The problem is that the dream was so vivid, I didn't know it was a dream. (In fact, I'm still not 100% convinced.) I was convinced that this was something that had really happened yesterday. I spent the better part of this morning comparing the network and my local copies to make sure that my 18 directories of 150 to 300 files each were in sync and that all of the dates were sorted.
It was a good idea to do that in any case, but damn, it sucked!
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I can't believe that your IT people can't get some kind of document control going for you. All that slow directory shuffling is insane!
ReplyDeleteThat would certainly give me dreams, or nightmares.
Visual SourceSafe can't handle it (I discovered at my old job) and I doubt that Sharepoint (what we use now) can deal with it either, although I'm not sure if we've tried that yet.
ReplyDeleteI think the actual technical impediment here may be that there are some subdirectories involved as well.
You'd have to check out the whole directory at once, which also means downloading the whole thing or at least updating a local copy over a sprawly network and possibly a VPN connection as well. Which is what we're doing already, of course, except without the doc control system, which would probably drag like crazy if we put that kind of a load on it.
Maybe. I don't know if anyone's ever looked into it, to tell the truth. The IT people are fine when it comes to fixing stuff that's broken, but being asked to do something creative seems to throw them for a loop.
With SVN you always have a complete local copy. You don't have to download anythign until you "update" to sync your local copy with the repository, then you "commit" when you are ready to put your changes back up. It's a different system than one which requires checkouts and locks files/subdirectories. SVN does code merging and such.
ReplyDeleteAnd the file transfers would be limited to just the files changed, which would cut down on the amount of data going back and forth.
I'm no SVN expert, but we do use it over a VPN on occasion. In fact, we use it over a hardware VPN all day long at the office, since it is running on a campus server and we're off-campus.
Anywho, I'm sure there's some techincal issue I'm not aware of, it's just unfortunate.
The "technical issue" might be ignorance on the parts of everyone involved (we lack the technical knowledge, and the IT people lack the interest), or it could be political (i.e. maybe the rules say it's Sharepoint or nothing, even though Sharepoint is inadequate).
ReplyDeleteI will mention Subversion to my boss, and/or her boss, because it really would be nice to get something that doesn't suck. Zipping and unzipping big fat directories sucks, and it'd be very nice if we could each easily maintain local copies of the entire 5000-file set instead of just the pieces parts.