From: Tomas Frydrych (tomas@frydrych.uklinux.net)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 15:30:00 EDT
Hi Randy,
> This is certainly a little bit off the main point of this thread, but
> I find myself getting confused. When I think of "revision" I think of
> two possible meanings:
>
> * the one this thread is about -- a group of people reviewing a
> document and proposing revisions and corrections, and the subsequent
> acceptance of one of possibly several conflicting revisions
> * the thing that an individual might do to his own document in the
> course of writing / editing
This is an important point. The revision terminology was used in
earlier versions of Word; I have noticed the other day that on the
Word2000 menu it is now called "Track Changes", that is certainly
a better description of the process (and I suspect it came from
some MS focus group or something like that).
For me "revisions" is in essence a capability to track all changes in
a single physical copy of a document, and to display them in a
user-comprehensible manner. I would like to keep this separate
from what might be better termed as "version control", by which I
mean multiple people working on separate copies of what started
as a single document and then bringing their changes together to
produce again a single final document.
I think the key to the latter is in mechanism that will merge the
separate ordinary documents into a single document that uses the
"revisions" notation to represent all the changes. The issues
pertaining to "version control" handling are not of immediate
interest to me, except to the extent that the notation we will use for
tracking "revisions" must be suitable for describing such changes
that would be produced by multiple authors.
Tomas
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