Is it feasible to use svn for documents

Question

We need to have documents shared between clients (CRM-like functionality). Users need to be able to:

• Edit the documents and save them again
• Attach new documents

Our application is coded in WPF with WCF for data-transport and NHibernate/SQL for data on the server.

what we're thinking is to use SVN and have the app create a local check-out of parts of the repository (when they click a document, it is checked out by SVN in the background and opened from the local path) - When saved it will silently (using monitoring of the path) be committed back to the repository.

Question: Is this feasible - or are there better solutions to this?

EDIT 1: Summary so far:

• I'll look into using Git/Mercurial instead of SVN
• Document size (revisions) might be prohibitive pending tests
• SharePoint is an option (although not viable in my case as the cost alone is prohibitive) - I will look into the alternatives for SharePoint, tho.
• Not much experience out there about using repositories for many users although it works for small teams..
• Wiki software might be an alternative to SVN.

Thanks for all the feedback - I'll keep it open a bit longer.

EDIT 2: Summary after a few days of work - I have a client working - see my progress here.

Answer 1

Based on the heavy .NET references, are you all set up with MSDN? Perhaps you can make use of SharePoint...which may already be included within your MSDN account.

Answer 2

I wouldn't use SVN for this, SVN is not very efficient when dealing with binary files. By using SVN as a back channel for some content in your application you just complicate things by adding another technology and dependency, but you will not use much of its real potential.

I would store the documents as blobs in the database and get/store them through WCF.

Answer 3

Generally I don't think that SVN or any version control system is a good thing to use for sharing documents. Main disadvantage is the diff system on binary files... Your SVN repo will grow rapidly..

Maybe you should try using some of the commercial tools designed for document sharing (eg. Microsoft Sharepoint). Or some Open Source alternatives... Perhaps you should read this post...

Answer 4

I think that using ready made and proven tech is great idea. Would like to see it's progress if you really go that way.

I would strongly go AGAINST SharePoint - you'll tie yourself to Microsoft in manners that are hard to describe here. From my point of view, SharePoint is a tech that needs taking care of just for itself.

Answer 5

It depends on the kind of documents you are using. If you have lots of changing, compressed binary files, then don't use it.

However, if the documents are in an open format like a Wiki language, (X)HTML, LaTeX or uncompressed ODF, then using a version control system makes absolutely sense. Also, a bunch of compressed ODF files or PDF files are handled very well, especially if the files are mostly smaller than 5 MB or so.

In addition, make sure to check some more recent version control systems like Mercurial and Git before sticking to the conceptually outdated SVN. In your scenario, you won't profit much from the "distributed" part of Mercurial and Git, but they are nevertheless easier to setup - at least to my experience. And they provide very advanced version control features which can save your day in the rare cases when you need them.

In case you stick to SVN, and if your client software runs under a modern Unix system, you can also try SVN-FS. This is a filesystem that uses a remote SVN server. Each read goes to the latest revision. Each write creates a new commit. This seems to be exactly what you wanted to build around SVN.

Answer 6

You might also want to consider using a Wiki for document management - I've seen this done and do it myself for my own organisation. We're using Atlassian's Confluence Wiki. Confluence provides for the versioning and general management of documents.