See Using Version Control Systems for full details on the new VCS support in Help+Manual 9.
Integrated Git and SVN support plus an editable scripted interface for any VCS
In the past, Help+Manual used the programming interface of version control systems (VCS) to interface with them. This involved a huge amount of development work, which was repeated every time the systems introduced software changes. Among other things, this caused significant problems for Subversion (SVN) users. In addition to having to use older versions of SVN, they also had to install additional SVN tools from another third party provider.
The new scripted interface is user-configurable
This situation was untenable and has now been corrected. Help+Manual now uses the editable scripted interface supported by all modern version control systems. Ready-to-use scripts for Git and Subversion are already included. In addition to this, there is a script template called by Help+Manual that you can use to interface with any other system that supports command line access. The scripts for Git and SVN are also fully-editable, allowing you to configure them for your own needs.
Resulting changes
No more TOC icons
This update has resulted in a couple of unavoidable changes. First and foremost, you will no longer have the overlay icons in the Help+Manual TOC showing the current VCS status of each topic. This is no longer possible, because it depends on the programming interface. However, the benefit is that you now have the ability to configure VCS access and provide integrated access to any modern VCS, not just the nominally supported Git and SVN.
No default support for Team Foundation Server
In addition to this, we have removed standard support for Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). Microsoft TFS has always been the most problematic VCS, and it is available in several not mutually compatible versions, so Help+Manual was only able to support a subset of the system anyway. TFS is also on the way to becoming obsolete, and even Microsoft is switching to Git for its own version control needs. We have thus decided to no longer support it by default. Instead, TFS users who must stay with TFS need to configure the custom script template for their version of TFS. This can be achieved using Microsoft's tf.exe program for the command line calls. However, if possible, we strongly recommend switching to Git, which is significantly superior to TFS.
