Strategies for dealing with versions?

[tomjohnson1492]

I'm authoring DITA content that has a lot of versions. There are probably 20 different versions of the product. We also want to use a source control like SVN to manage the content and all the versions. Are there specific strategies I should use when versioning content?

For example, should I just store all content for version 2.0 into a file folder with 2.0 in the title? And all content for version 3.0 into a folder with 3.0 in the title? I feel like there's a lot more strategy I should be following when handling versions with DITA content. Any tips?

[adrian]

Hi,

I can't really comment for DITA in specific, but the general rule for development with version control systems (I'm thinking of SVN here) is that you work with a trunk, branches and tags.

You can read around the web a bit about what these three concepts ('trunk', 'branch' and 'tag') refer to:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1614 ... positories

Do you actively develop all these versions in parallel?
Are they versions of the documentation or do they each represent the documentation for a different version of a product. Do the versions have an ancestry with a previous/older version?

Regards,
Adrian

[tomjohnson1492]

Thanks for the info. Different customers use different versions of the product, so we have to maintain valid doc for each version. Your response answers my question. I am aware of how software teams use version control, and I guess we might follow the same pattern. Thanks,

Tom