Tinderbox and Version Control
At Tinderbox Weekend London, J. Nathan Matias took a close look at using version control tools to help workgroups collaborate on Tinderbox. He’s just blogged a nice summary.
The very short answer:
- It should be easy!
- It’s actually quite tricky, because off-the-rack version control tools care about the order of things to which XML is indifferent.
- There aren’t great solution for version control of XML files.
The catch is that XML doesn’t care – in fact is required not to care – about the order of XML attributes: <item Name="..." ID="..."> is equivalent to code><itemID="..." Name="..." >. If you code by hand, the sequence doesn’t change, and version control works fine; if you’re generating the XML from a program, the program is free to use any order it likes and you get the same results.
The good news: starting with Tinderbox 4.7.0, Tinderbox files will be saved with consistent attribute ordering, and so now version control will work the way you’d want it to. The post is the first in an exciting series that will discuss how teams can share one Tinderbox file across the office or across the world.