RE: Versioning goals doc

At 3:20 PM -0400 9/25/98, Jim Whitehead wrote:
>While I agree that using a Vgraph places some restrictions on the solution
>space, I doubt they're as restrictive as you're making them out to be.  A
>version graph approach does rule out sums of changes approaches similar to
>those used in the PIE system.  In these systems, a user constructs the state
>of each object by adding together various changes (e.g., start with
>baseline, add bug fix #43, add bug fix #56, add operating system upgrade
>patch).
>
>But, I don't think this is what you're proposing WebDAV adopt.

On the other hand, this is one of the things that I was very concerned that
the initial version requirements _not prevent_. The change-oriented
approach to collaboration is rapidly becoming mainstream in the CSCW
research world (5 papers in the upcoming conference this November).

Web collaboration should be at least as suitable for document editing as
software versioning.

This is a second level comment -- I've not read the new goals document, but
I strongly disagree with mandating a non-"additive" approach in WebDAV.

>I guess I don't see your objection to a version graph.  If someone is making
>changes to resources, and these changes are tracked, then a revision of a
>resource has an "is-derived-from" relationship between it an the resource it
>is derived from.  Once you accept that this relationship exists (and it
>seems to me that it must if the system supports reverting to a previous
>revision), then it is reasonable to discuss the topology of the
>relationships, and to give a name to the set of resources and relationships
>between them.  Hence version graph.

If this graph can have multiple ancestors, and can (if the server supports
and wants) be discontinuous, withsome versions unrelated to the others,
then it's very convenient, and not pernicious.

In the additive case the relationships may all be implicit or purely a
result of user assertion as to the _intended_ place of a revision including
multile changes from many other versions, and perhaps undoing some but not
all of the changes actually in some of those versions.

  -- David

_________________________________________
David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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Received on Friday, 25 September 1998 16:32:40 UTC