[ale] Documents and VCS (was Re: Anyone looking for a new gig?)

[George L. Allen]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 04:28:59PM -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> Stephen Benjamin wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Geoffrey <lists at serioustechnology.com>wrote:
> > 
> 
> I don't think I said anything about organization.  I was focused, for 
> the most part on graphics. Html is simply the wrong tool, it's for 
> websites, not a sheet of paper.
> 
> > 
> > But hey, if writing your resume in vi and using txt2doc makes you happy, so
> > be it.

I just mentioned it because I *do* like writing my resume (and everything
else) in vi.  I keep it checked in to mercurial (was RCS when I started).
If I ever need to customize it for some particular reason, I can create a
branch and keep it in version control.

MS word has "Version Control" but not in the diff/patch/merge sense,
certainly not in the git/hg/*vs/RCS sense. And I only mentioned html
because LaTeX can generate html, which I can cut and paste into word if
necessary. (LaTeX->html->tidy/edit->firefox->cut/paste->word seemed to work
a little bit better than LaTeX->RTF->Word last time I was generating MS
Word resumes.)

None of this had anything to do with graphics. 


Personally - I hadn't considered that recruiters editing submitted resumes
was a common buisness practice. I instinctively prefer pdf to other formats
for finished documents because it provides a minimal level of authenticity
and integrity (like paper). 


But - back to VCS and documents. I wish there were a way I could replace
sharepoint at work with git... or mediawiki. There is a large ammount of
man hours at work spent swapping Word files, hand-jamming in changes,
uploading to sharepoint, tracking what is where, finding out who has the
latest changes, etc. etc.

Even though most of us naturally understand the idea of a patch or merge,
most of the non-IT people generating these documents 'collaborate' by email
by sending around more and more modifications to more and more copies of MS
Word files, then merging by hand. Changes get lost, and it takes a large
ammount of diligence just to maintain who has the current, cannonical copy
of a given file where.

I guess I want a MS Word work-alike to work like GIT, but require no
training. This probably brings us to wiki's, which allow the full measure
of collaboration and change tracking. Unfortunately, I haven't defeated the
FUD with regard to that yet.

They are fully bought into sharepoint, which I don't like, because you have
to manage both the site, the files, and the content. A wiki allows you to
manage the content only - and the site maintains itself, because there is
only one major content-type (an article) which is organized via a
namespace.

Anyway - not sure if I've made a clear point or just rambled in a general
direction. But we have such good tools to manage source code, but the tools
to manage documents are still sortof primitive imho. I might be missing
something though.

-George