Workaround for iWork and Subversion
I’ve been good over the past few months about stashing all my working documents into a Subversion repository on my MacBook Pro. It’s actually saved my bacon a couple of times, so it was totally worth the initial ramp-up time.
Unfortunately the Apple iWork Apps — Keynote, Pages and Numbers — don’t play well with Subversion. They are really directories, not files, so anytime you save the “file,” it clobbers everything in the directory, including the .svn file. When you try to commit, you get “~” status, which no one likes.
So, this is my brutal workaround:
- Save your initial file where you normally would. Add it, and commit.
Next time you need to work on it, don’t work in that file.
- Copy the file to your Desktop, or a tmp directory, and work in the copied file.
When you are done with your edits and ready to check it in:
- Fire up the shell,
- cd into the whatever.numbers (.pages, .key) directory,
- cp -r * to the whatever.numbers directory of your svn working files.
- Then, you should be able to commit the changes as normal.
Hideous, I know, but it seems to work. Please drop a note or a comment if you have a better way to handle this.
