Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Me: Okay, well, you can probably download it from your OWN email, because it will be there in the attachments. But if you think you need me to send this file back to you, the one you sent four hours ago, I'll do that. (At this point, I start thinking about suicide, as an honorable way out of this profession.)
Fred: I've used the online form. (Our online email form). I would like that version if possible.
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Version control is always fun.
Programmers normally use version control software. When you first create a module of code, you check it into the repository. When you want to do more work on it, you check it out, make your changes, and check it back in. The version control software saves the
differences between the original and your new version as a revision point. You can go back and get whatever state in the revisions you like by specifying the revision you are checking out.
Program code is plain text. Word processor files are a different matter. I had an exchange with a British university professor looking for ways to use Git (the most popular version control software) with Word documents. I told him it might be possible. Microsoft uses a variant of XML as the underlying data storage format, and XML is text based. If you can get to the underlying XML, you might be able to use Git for versioning.
He went looking for the XML and couldn't find it. No surprise - MS actually stores that stuff in a zip archive, and you would need to use an archive utility to open and extract the XML from it.
That he was tech savvy enough to want to use Git for version control, but didn't know the Word doc was basically a zip file
was a little bemusing...
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Dennis