A long, long time ago we dumped Microsoft Office for Open Office and Neo Office. But as much as we like the “open” part of Open Office sometimes it’s just a pain to work with it. So Lukas invested some time in re-creating our company templates and now we are using the iWork 08 package.

But something we did not consider is the file format iWork uses and how we usually store files: Packages and SVN.
The documents are wrapped up in so called packages. Essentially these are just folders which are displayed like files. Double-clicking does not show the content of these packages but opens the corresponding application. By using the context menu “see package content” you can reveal the content of this folder. What’s inside this package ? The actual document, thumbnails, images, everything. Sounds like a smart idea, right ? Yes it is. But the iWork applications have the cumbersome behaviour to delete all the files which are in the package and do not actually belong to the package. Get it ? Yes. iWork deletes SVN files! Solutions ? There are several. None of which really aid enhance the workflow:

• Make a copy if the SVN files and put them back in the package after saving the document in iWork
• Work on a copy of the package and move the changed content into the SVN working copy
• Create a tar or zip archive and check it in instead of the package
• Just wait another 5 years for the SVN to become collections aware
• Use this script written by Daniel Sadilek
• Move to SVK which should handle this case
• Or try to convince Apple that iWork should behave a little more tolerant (which they will ignore ;-) )

And what do we do? We are still trying to figure how we deal best with it. But i don’t think we move away from iWork soon. After all we make money by using Textmate, Netbeans and Eclipse.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 23:42 and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.