RoboHelp integration with Git version control

Hi Jonathan,

First of all, let me acknowlege that I am not a source control expert. So what I'm describing below may not be technically correct. All I know is that our s/w development  team switched from Surround (SCM) to GIT last spring and the Tech Pubs group unwittingly went along. It didn't work for us. The biggest issue we had is that GIT doesn't lock (check out) files that are being worked on--everyone who is working on the same Robohelp projects has  writable copies of all files on their hard drives. While that approach works if you are disciplined about only working on your specific projects, we ran into merge conflicts if both writers inadvertently made changes to the same help project within the same time frame.

GIT provides no mechanism to prevent this and the issue is compounded because of the way Robohelp manages files--it changes some files behind the scenes even when all you did was to open a project and publish it to a different location. We spent lots of time trying to figure out which writer's version of these changed files were the "right" ones and which ones could be overwritten. In some cases, we resorted to emailing known good files to the other writerin order  to avoid having to use GIT's diff tool to resolve line-by-line differences.

That said, if you get good GIT training and if you are more source-control savvy than me, you may end up loving GIT like our developers do. In our case, the developers pretty quickly got tired of helping us figure out merge conflicts and agreed to let us go back to using Surround. We are much happier now.

Hope this helps,

Kathy