Re: design q -- what are revisions for?

From: David Chart (linux@dchart.demon.co.uk)
Date: Sat May 18 2002 - 14:57:54 EDT

  • Next message: Paul Rohr: "Re: design q -- what are revisions for?"

    On Sat, 2002-05-18 at 19:47, Paul Rohr wrote:
    > This is even more of a sociology question than the last one.
    >
    > What organizational function(s) do revision marks serve?
    >
    > Off the cuff, I can think of at least four use cases:
    >
    > 1. revisions are suggestions
    > -----------------------------
    >
    > 2. revisions are about legal games
    > -----------------------------------
    >
    > 3. revisions are about credit
    > ------------------------------
    >
    > 4. revisions are about blame
    > -----------------------------
    >
    > bottom line
    > -----------
    > I don't claim that the above enumeration is exhaustive, nor that we should
    > necessarily support all of them. Yet until we know which use cases we do
    > (and don't) intend to support, it's hard to assess the merits of a given
    > design.

    I'd say that we should support 1 & 2, but not 3 & 4. 1 & 2 are part of
    the writing process, and thus it is appropriate to do them in the WP.
    The point is that the revisions are in the document, and it is easy to
    incorporate or reject them -- one click of a button.

    3 & 4 are about long-term version tracking, which is better done with
    something like CVS, in my opinion. They aren't about the process of
    writing, which is what a word processor should support. I've moved all
    of my abi documents into CVS so that I can track changes, but I don't
    want all the changes to be in the document. It would get very big...

    >
    > Paul
    > motto -- the mark of good design: you can't see the hard work behind it

    Just how many mottoes do you have, Paul? ;-)

    -- 
    David Chart
    


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