Question

I currently have a shared folder with 2 other (not very technical) people where they like to drop interesting articles (usually .pdf) and also keep ONE text file called randomIdeas where they add text with whatever pops into their minds.

Problem is someone adds to the top, the other to the bottom, adds things in the middle, etc. I hate re-reading the entire file every time to see what has changed since I’m so used to reviewing changesets… I need some help coming up with a strategy to version these files (I don’t like dropbox ‘versioning’) with mercurial so I can see changesets really quickly.

I figured I can set up a repository for these files along with a cron job that runs once a day and detects if there are changes. If there are it would commit a new changeset. That way I can easily review the changeset to see what has changed. The only issue is I don’t want either party to be aware of what is going on. I don’t want them to see a .hg folder, or have that folder syncing with them, etc because it might confuse them.

Any help on how can I accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here are some variations and ideas you might consider:

If they use Windows Explorer and don’t have it configured to display hidden files and folders, you could mark the .hg folder with the Hidden attribute.

You could make the repository at a higher level so that the .hg folder is in a parent directory rather than the same directory as these files.

You could set up a job on your computer to pull from the shared repository often enough to ensure you have a backup. Won’t work if they delete .hg at the same time they make changes.

If I were really concerned about them deleting .hg, I would make a job on my machine to frequently re-write a text-file list of new files in the shared directory (or copy new files – depends on total size and backup plans) and copy randomIdeas.txt from the shared directory to a local directory set up as a repository, and commit there. That way you have complete control over the repository and for each commit you see what articles/files were added to the folder and what changes were made to randomIdeas.txt.