Re: PLink availability/feature requests

From: Henry van Eyken (vaneyken@sympatico.ca)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 03:28:29 PDT


Maybe somebody said this before, but just to be sure ...

One can do the journalling of the history of a part of a document outside it,
in a separate journal. But one can also do it inside the document.

If I were to replace a page on the Bootstrap website, I could put an
appropriate journalling mechanism to work within that page. Or choose not to do
so! That journalling mechanism might be a linking to a shadow page that is a
record of all (significant) changes made throughot the history of the document.
This maybe more economical than keeping copes of all versions of a document on
hand.

As Eugene easrlier eluded to, there are documents and there are documents. The
way one would deal with the continual updating of an ezine front page may well
be different from dealing with versioning of a treatise. the first is not
likely to be the kind of material that should enter a dkr, the second is.
Hence, the the method used for journalling within a document may well different
for a front page than for an article or for an advertisement or for dicussion
group pages.

An added advntage of allowing a document's author to handle the journalling is
that it allows him to make personal decisions about his work, decisions that
allow for both halves of his brain to function. A journalling system imposed by
a single available technical design is perhaps too autocratic.

Henry

Eugene Eric Kim wrote:

> On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Eric Armstrong wrote:
>
> > 1) The ID should ideally be globally unique.
> > That requirement allows me to modify a document, while you
> > do likewise, and merge our additions with a minimum of
> > overlap problems. (The fact that we both created nodes in
> > the same place creates a decidable problem: Should your
> > change come before or after mine. But if we both create a
> > node with the same ID, the issue is realistically
> > undecidable: Who gets the original ID, who gets a different
> > ID, and what happens as a consequence of changing the ID
> > you *thought* you had created, if you are the loser.
>
> No two people should ever create a node with the same ID. You can get
> around this simply by attaching the user ID to the ID of every document.
> If two people are trying to merge changes to the same node, it'll
> necessarily be up to a human to resolve which addition gets merged. I'm
> not aware of any version control system that works otherwise.
>
> -Eugene
>
> --
> +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
> | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
> +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:58:05 PDT