Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Revision control for DocBook SGML/XML documents

[Dan York <dyork@e-smith.com>]

> thought I might use GNU RCS.

I would *strongly* encourage you to look at CVS instead of RCS.  MUCH better
is so many ways... (and CVS evolved out of the work on RCS but uses a merging
versus locking model)

  http://www.cvshome.org/

and specifically:

  http://www.cvshome.org/dev/codewindow.html

where there are instructions for that other operating system.  ;-)

> Does this mean that I need to maintain my document in a one sentence per 
> line format to use RCS and ediff? 

No. None of my documents are in that format, and I use CVS for revision
control on all my SGML docs.

> Does this present any problems when processing XML files, for I seem to recall 
> reading somewhere that white space in XML documents is significant?

White space in XML documents is NOT significant.  (At least, with none of the
implementations of XML that I work with.... and I can't see why it would be.)

> Is there a way to show only the words that have changed, as opposed to showing 
> lines with changes?

Not with RCS or CVS. They are *line* oriented.  The diff shows you the lines
where changes have occurred.  (But if your lines are only 70-80 characters
long, i.e. they do not *wrap* but rather have a line break at the end, I have
not personally found it too difficult to see where the changes are.)

> Other suggestions on how best to track revisions, if RCS is not the way to go, 
> would be very much appreciated.

As mentioned above, I would go with CVS.

Regards,
Dan