For better or worse I've moved past using GIT for dealing with my business back office. Version control should simply baked in to the OS. Dropbox is starting to get it right to a limited degree.

Mark, what does Dropbox do in the "clash" situation I outline in https://paulhammant.com/2014... ?

Funny thing is I don't know. I've been operating my business on Dropbox for ~18mths and have yet to create the problem. My wife has been doing for far longer. Even more interesting MS seems to be building in support for the Cloud into Office. I assume (untested) that this will allow synchronous editing.

I think word documents and spreadsheets avoid the problem that code has since we don't do large refactorings that span 100's of documents at one time.

I'm beginning to wonder if applying version control to documents is right approach at al.

Have a look at https://www.versionrocket.com/ - with thunks a Git-aware side panel into MsWord. Also http://sparkleshare.org/ (Dropbox meets Github) though it needs work to unzip-merge-rezip as I outline, but at least has a single place where that could happen w/o the Git maintainers needing to agree with the strategy.

Paul - thanks. Both tools look cool. Sadly VersionRocket doesn't support Mac's yet.

Cheers
Mark

You could do it with git hook scripts and perhaps filewatcher (that continually unzips) so that you can view the changes. Then add gitignore for the zipped files.

I don't think that would work. That said I'm often wrong. Care to do a proof of concept for a blog entry?

Depends on what kind of behaviour you want. If you have a pre-commit to unzip into a folder and post-checkout hook to zip folders into files. Then you need other hooks to handle rebase, merge etc. You could have some name convention for the folders that should turn into word files. You will need to run some script to install the hooks when cloning.

Surely commit hook scripts can only work on things that are not in the .gitignore list ?

Yes, that's why you have the folders named something like document._docx so that the scripts can recreate the file document.docx.

You could always save in Open Document format. I assume (without actually having tested) that it has better idempotency properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...