[GD-General] Re: asset & document management

[Enno R. <en...@de...>]

Mickael Pointier wrote:

> So back to our own product. It's minimalistic in the sense that it does not
> perform archiving and cannot merge. Basicaly it's an "Exclusive Checkout"
> based system that simply allow people to get/put/add/checkout/checking files
> from a common network repository.

I've also had a look at unison, because someone on the list mentioned it. I 
don't like the idea of not being in control over the archiving. On the one 
hand, I clearly don't want to keep all the old versions.

If I can't buy the asset management that I like, this is what I think I'd 
like to build:

CVS has a lot of features (webcvs, logs, branching, tags, etc.) that I 
wouldn't want to miss. Also, I really like TortoiseCVS, because it has the 
"integrate in the explorer shell" functionality you mentioned, and that's 
making many people feel a lot more comfortable than a command line, 
especially designers and artists.

On the other hand, large binaries that undergo several changes a day are not 
manageable in CVS in the long run. What I would really want is to be able to 
say "only keep the last 5 versions, treat the rest as if they are 0-length 
files". It might be possible to extend CVS like that - the cvs files are 
fairly easy to read, and I could write an external process that locks a 
directory once a day, and kicks out old versions. Obviously, this only works 
on binaries where I don't have diffs, but always full files.

In addition, I would like to be able to "nail down" an archived version, so 
it doesn't get flushed out. Anthing with a tag on it, for example, would be 
kept.

If that's workable, I'd get the power of CVS, but not the huge storage 
requirement. And something that the artist already know from other places.

Anyone who sees a problem in that?

Enno.