This isn’t true anymore. The O’Reilly Atlas system now uses git!
O’Reilly Media’s DocBook build system lives in a subversion repository, and that’s just fine, but we like to use git. Subversion is more than adequate for a book. We’re not really dealing in code, and we don’t really branch a book chapter. There’s already a lot of social control built into the process. One author says “I want to work on regexes” and another says “I want to work on subroutines” and off they go to work on those separate chapters. Since the outline is mostly set in stone (but one of those really soft ones, not like Bedrock), we don’t have to move a lot of files around or guess at cross references. This means that we don’t need excellent branching and merging support. Continue reading “They use subversion, we use git”