File management for I7 collaboration

Is there a “best practice” for sharing story files when two or more people are collaborating on an I7 project?

The only way I know to do it is to copy the story.ni file into the project in the Terminal shell. Jim Aikin mentioned an option where you can show the contents of a package folder in the Finder, but that’s not intuitive for me. I am foremost a programmer but my collaborator is not, so I’m not always sure what method would be easiest for my collaborator.

Personally, sharing files without using version control makes me itch, but I’m not sure if there’s a VCS that would be convenient for both participants in this case. I’m open to recommendations.

Thanks,

Mike

Showing the contents of a package is non-intuitive only because Apple chose to obfuscate in the interest of pseudo-user-friendliness. In Windows, the contents are browsable just like the contents of any other folder. (Score one for Windows!)

The tools menu has a Show Package Contents command. It’s hard for me to see that that isn’t intuitive – but I’m in a cranky mood this morning, so please forgive me for being brusque. I’ve just been arguing with a conservative friend, attempting to pull his head out of his ass on some basic issues of how government works.

What’s non-intuitive is that Inform 7 won’t let you name your source code file. This makes versioning a good deal more difficult.

If your email program preserves tab characters, you could always do a Select All and email the source text back and forth. That would work, I think.

–JA

I would recommend that you create a symlink of story.ni, or better yet the .inform file, and share the symlink via a Dropbox shared folder. Dropbox will automatically resolve the symlink, so you and your collaborator(s) will be able to work directly from the .inform project in the Dropbox folder. Dropbox will also store all older versions of the project, so you have at least some version control (though without metadata).

–Erik

Jim, I think it is unintuitive – I’ve been using Macs for a couple decades and I didn’t know about “Show Package Contents” until someone (possibly you) explained to me how to find the I6 code for a project. In fact it just took me a full minute to find it even though I knew what I was looking for; ctrl-clicking on a file in the Finder is just not something I’m used to doing, and I think if Apple really expected me to be doing it a lot they would’ve given me a right mouse button.

Adding to the confusion, I think almost everything in the ctrl-click menu but “Show Package Contents” is in the File Menu; this may be the can’t do without ctrl-clicking in the Finder. (I’m almost certainly going to be wrong about that.)

Also, this may be a really stupid question, but why is it necessary to extract story.ni instead of sending the whole thing that appears in the Finder?

Sending the whole thing works, but (1) you have to zip it up to send to another Mac, which is an extra step; (2) it’s like a hundred times larger than the bare .ni file.

(Size not actually measured, as I don’t have the compiler in front of me.)

Thanks!