I recently bought the new iWork ’08 suite from Apple and have started using the tools for stuff I used to use NeoOffice for. But I noticed something yesterday that is disconcerting.

Like a lot of people, I store my documents in a CVS repository that is backed up to another disk. I checked in a few documents created with Pages and Numbers, and everything seemed fine. That is, until I re-saved any of the documents.

The problem lies in the fact that a “document” for Pages or Numbers (and probably for Keynote as well) is not a monolithic file like a .doc file from Word. They are directory structures (“bundles” is the Apple term) that the Finder and the applications that use them treat specially. Any program in the /Applications folder is the same type of thing. When you check something into a CVS repository, CVS creates a hidden CVS directory in each sub-directory of the thing being checked in. After checking in one of these documents, I went into the document through Terminal and verified that the CVS directories had been created. So far, so good.

When things went awry was when I re-saved a document. Instead of just changing the necessary files inside the “document,” Numbers deleted and re-created the entire directory structure. Thus, those CVS directories were toast. There’s no good way to recover from this, because those files now look like non-CVS files, but the server already knows about them. To my knowledge, there’s no painless way to handle this situation.

I don’t believe that Subversion is in any better position. When using SVN, you get a .svn directory created in each sub-directory of the document, but those will also get whacked when the document is re-saved. I haven’t tested that assumption, but it seems logical.

I tried to come up with a solution to this, but I’m stumped. I looked into cvswrappers just to see if it could help, but it doesn’t look like it. I also considered a pre-commit script and a post-checkout analog (if there is one), but this didn’t seem like it would really get us there.

The only solution I see is for Apple to stop whacking the directory structure and just change the files inside it that it needs to, and stop molesting the version-control special files. Maybe they can implement this behavior when they add support for OpenOffice and the OpenDocument format…