From: msevior_at_physics.unimelb.edu.au
Date: Sun Dec 14 2003 - 06:13:31 EST
>
> This is just few notes of explanations on my recent revisions and
> versioning work (I am planing to commit a lengthy how-to by the end
> of the week).
>
> Revisions
> ------------
> Conceptually revisions are like scribling with red pen onto a paper
> printout. Any changes made to a document in the revisions-on mode are
> recorded and can be shown in different colour for different authors.
> Subsequently, they can be accepted (incorporated permanently into the
> document) or rejected (erased from the document).
>
> To avoid any misunderstanding: revision information is only recorded
> in revisions-on mode which is controlled by the user; nothing
> sinister happening here.
>
> In addition to marking and accepting/rejecting revisions, any
> document with revisions in it can be shown as if all revisions were
> accepted, or as if all revisions were rejected. This makes it
> possible, for example, to retain revisions in the document to keep
> track of its development, but still print it for distribution.
>
> One down side of using revisions is that you could potentially
> distribute an electronic version of a doc with the revision
> information in it when you do not want to, particularly when the
> revisions are collapsed. There is no fool proof way around that, and
> my feeling is that if you use revisions then it is your
> responsibility to check there are none left you do not want them to
> be (revisions never sneak into the document, you have to create
> them).
>
> Versioning
> -------------
> When a new document is created using the File->New command, it is
> given a unique id. The document retains this id for the rest of its
> lifetime. So if you create a copy of it by using File->Save As, or
> just make copy of the file by some copy command, we can compare the
> uid's in the two docs and say if they started life as the same
> document or not (again, there is nothing sinister going on here, the
> uid is just a big random number, it carries no information about who
> or where created that document).
>
> We also keep track of some basic information about open/save
> sessions. For each open/save session (i.e., once if you open a
> document and save it at least once while working on it) we increase
> the document version number by 1, store a time when this happens, and
> a random id. We also record cumulative editing time for each version
> number.
>
> Between the uid and the version history we can tell (a) if two
> documents belong to the same family, and, (b) if they do at which
> version number (and so when) they became different from each other.
> In other words, we can construct family-trees of documents with the
> same id (perhaps most useful of this is the abilty to tell that two
> documents are identical without having to compare what is in them).
>
> Comparing and merging documents
> ---------------------------------------------
> In additon to the versioning info we can now compare two arbitrary
> docs to each other: we can compare their stylesheets, we can compare
> their contents and we can also compare their formating.
>
> What is more, we can merge the contents of two documents using
> revision marks: having a doc1 and doc2, AbiWord can make revisions to
> doc1 that are necessary for it to look like doc2. These are exactly
> the same as human made revisions, and can subsequntly be
> accepted/rejected in the normal manner or undone using
> Undo. (The merging algorithm will need some tuning, but it basically
> works.)
>
Hi Tomas,
Thank you very much for this excellent description and for these
extremely cool features. AbiWord needs these to be useful to
advanced "Knowledge Workers". I not have been a sufficient Power
User of Word Processors to use these features in the past but
from your description I'm sure they would have useful in
preparing Grant applications with several colleagues.
After debugging we need import/export from MS Word/RTF (*sigh*) (at least)
and OOo (one day).
I can help with RTF and I guess I'll understand more how all this works
while decyphering how RTF does things but I probabally not before
February. I still have a hope of getting a Maths Editor
in for 2.2 but things have not been moving fast on that front for a while.
Cheers,
Martin
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