Brian's Waste of Time

Tue, 09 Jan 2007

Mercurial For Documents (on Mac)

Apple's iWork apps work bloody nicely, but they have a vicious flaw in the '06 version -- they delete stuff inside the archive, such as .svn directories. This sucks, really badly, and means that if you use Keynote or Pages, and are paranoid about versioning (like a lot of folks) things, and like svn, you have gnashed for a while.

Anyway, I switched to using Mercurial for these docs. The main reason I like it for my docs directory is that it has a built-in concept of adding and removing things as needed. You can have a simple script like:

cd ~/Documents
/opt/local/bin/hg remove --after
/opt/local/bin/hg add
/opt/local/bin/hg commit -m "Commit docs from WorkFlow Script Thing"

Which does the ~right thing with regard to these broken archive things. I haven't haven't figured out the right way to do Pages and Keynote plugins/wrappers/magic to automatically do revisions on saving docs, when those docs are in the right directory, yet, but it is coming :-)

writebacks...

Andrew Savory


This problem has been around since the early editions of Keynote. The packaging of all the resources within one directory and making them show up as one file in OS X is neat, but having to zip iWork files before committing them is a real pain.

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