Excluding Files from Source Control (TeamForge)

Well, there you go - multiple authors (potentially) & backup. I've always been a lone author with a good backup regime, so I fall into the source control No Fun™ crowd. Even with the one project that had 2 of us, we worked on opposite sides of the planet, so just zipping it up & sticking it in a shared folder worked fine - I think Peter has referred to this method of handing off as the "hot potato" model.😁

I'm actually a fan of source control, even for a single writer, assuming the organisation you're in already has a source control system - trying to support source control by yourself as a writer is Not Fun(tm) and I do not recommend.

• You can't easily forget to back up your work.
• If you screw up a find and replace, it's easy to get the last version of one or more files, depending on how badly you screwed up
• If you need to, you can go back to a complete older version to work on, which you may or may not have archived in a manual process.
• It's harder for the organisation to lose the help when it's with the rest of their source files. The amount of orphaned content on file shares is extraordinary. 🙂

That's my two cents. 

Why would you go through the hassle of source control if you didn't have multiple authors??

That's the bulk. Most of those files aren't added if you use the built in source control functions in RH, but I assume you're managing the check-in/out using TeamForge. In which case, you might also avoid other htm files starting with $, as those are related to previewing topics. Mostly they should be cleaned up automatically when the preview is closed, but sometimes they aren't.

I'm not sure if you've decided to source control your output, but if you've decided not to, then also don't add the !SSL! folder, which contains generated output. (I personally don't advise source controlling output, but some companies are adamant 🙂 )