Wondering if there are any gotchas on Using GitHub as opposed to dropbox? working with a technical team and they prefer github since the source is in it.It seems to me to be dropbox with the added step of manual commit (actually push the button to sync). Anybody have any additional wisdom to share about this?
I’ve been using GitHub to push copies of the user manual .scriv project. So far it seems to be functioning well. I’d say the one big advantage to using Dropbox is that you can get real-time updates on the .scriv file changes. If someone opens the file, you’ll get a Growl message stating that user.lock has been added. When they quit, you’ll get a user.lock removed message. That kind of feedback is valuable. Dropbox doesn’t have any kind of extensive fine-grained analysis though. If you want to be able to review changes on a byte-by-byte basis, GitHub will be better.
I do coding and prefer DropBox for solo projects because I can edit code on my computer and the changes are nearly instantaneously synced to the supercomputer that I want to run them on.
I also have experience with github. This is a distributed version control software with entirely separate purposes. Each member of the team could have a fork, but this would work fairly poorly with binary files like a scriv project.
Perhaps a better solution would be the new dropbox for teams or box.net which offers the conveniences of dropbox sync with collaboration(actually I don’t know much about these).
My major use of dropbox is to keep my files in sync across all of the many computers I work at. Git is great for managing revisions and merging changes in from other people, but again, the usefulness is limited for non text based binary files.
Best wishes,
Robert
Yeah, while the format isn’t actually binary (XML and RTF mostly, with a few plist and ini files for platform specific stuff) save for the research binary files that are imported into the project, it still would be pretty difficult to do a real merge. I can’t say I’d recommend it. The only time I’d want to mess with something like that is to recover a project broken by sync or something. The format just isn’t fundamentally designed for more than one people to be messing with it at once. That would take some major re-haul, and no technological interface on top of it is going to change that.