[texworks] Please help!

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2014-04-07 at 11:25:31 -0400, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

 > On 06/04/2014 9:44 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > > On Windows you have to use
 > >
 > >    http://tortoisesvn.net
 > >
 > > because Windows still lacks a clear concept of input encodings.
 > > The rest of the world is using UTF-8 for decades.
 > 
 > I don't think TortoiseSVN is required, but it definitely makes it
 > nice to use Subversion.

svn is a command-line tool and uses code page 850 on a German Windows
in order to add comments.  It doesn't translate CP850 to UTF8.  It's
certainly a deficiency of svn which could be solved easily.  A few
weeks ago I cross-compiled iconv for Windows successfully (both,
iconv.dll and iconv.exe).  Don't know why svn isn't using it.  As a
result, the history contains garbage if non-ASCII characters are
involved. 

The GUI of a German Windows is using CP1252 but Tortoise converts
CP1252 to UTF-8 internally.  Hence non-ASCII characters are processed
properly.

 > I wish there were an equivalent on the Mac.

On Unix systems I definitely prefer the command line because it's very
convenient and extremely powerful.
 
 > Marcin mentioned Git and Mercurial.  I've never tried Mercurial; I
 > tried Git, and really hated it.  Subversion has a simpler model:
 > one central repository, every revision with a sequential revision
 > number, instead of every checked out copy having its own subset of
 > revisions from a not-so-well-defined cloud of revisions.  It's not
 > easy to get not-very-technical collaborators to use Subversion; Git
 > was a complete failure in this.

Well, I know many people who love it.
 
Marcin also said that Git is for more experienced users with special
requirements.  IMO it's great that users can choose the system which
fits their needs best.  Beginners and experts have different
requirements and it's not useful to recommend a powerful system to a
beginner which he probably can't manage.

After all, what I suggested is to use a version control system at all,
which allows you to save the current state of a particular project at
any time and let you to retrieve any state.  The simplest one is much
better than nothing.  Dona lost data.  This is the worst thing which
can happen.

I don't know anything but svn, hence I don't know whether Mercurial is
easier to use.  Subversion is well documented, at least.  On the other
hand, Dona is a Windows user and I'm convinced that the user interface
of TortoiseSVN is quite good and easy to use.  So why not use it?

It's a pity that Tortoise doesn't support the command line.  AFAIR it
doesn't provide svn as an executable but only as a shared library.
There is no way to access it from the command line.

If problems occur it's much easier to tell people what to type rather
than where to click.  It's a pitty especially because svn's
commmand-line interface is platform-independent but Tortoise isn't.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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