Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sat 2nd Sep 2006 21:08 UTC, submitted by michuk
Version control systems are commonly used by programmers, but their benefits can easily be exploited by regular users as well. Learn how to install, configure (step-by-step) and use Subversion at home to improve control over your own set of documents.
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Member since:
2005-07-24
But aren't ODF files just a bunch of XML(plain text) documents inside a gz compressed file?
Technically, yes. So the 'external diffing tool' should at least unzip the document and diff the plaintext files inside.
However, a standard plaintext diffing tool will perform poorly: some ODF processing tool might have, for example, re-formatted the whitespace in the file. You want the diffing tool to be robust against that.
Even then, when your version of an ODF document conflicts with the version on the server, you don't want to be presented with the XML internals of the document. It is hard to read and harder to edit correctly. You want to see the changes using a tool that understands ODF and presents the differences in a user-friendly way, i.e. marking text sections etc.
OpenOffice already has some nice versioning features, but afaik it hasn't been made usable for CVS/SVN/... yet. All I'm saying: that would be really cool.