Re: Versioning Thoughts (in HTML)
Christopher Seiwald (seiwald@p3.com)
Thu, 6 Jun 1996 00:07:50 -0700
| From: "David G. Durand" <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
| Subject: Versioning Thoughts (in HTML)
|
| ...
|
| best done by tracking user operations, (typically editing operations) and
| constructing versions as sets of non-interfering edits. This makes merging
| and distribution easy, at the expense of making the notion of version
| trees only one of a variety of styles.
|
| ...
|
| <p>The semantics should not assume that there is a single predecessor
| version, or that if there are multiple predecessors, one of them is the
| "main" one. The semantics should not assume that every derived version
| even has a meaningful predecessor version. In my model, a user might want
| to designate a new "top-level version" for the result of a complicated
| merge involving many manual decisions about which changes to keep and how
| conflicts are to be resolved.
Sorry for the long excerpt: I believe what you are describing is what
in SCM circles is called "change sets." That's the approach to version
management where a configuration object is stored as a collection of
deltas and the contents of a "version" is the result of combining any
arbitrary subset of those deltas. This is in contrast to more traditional
SCM where a configuration object is a tree of versions, and deltas lead
from one version to the next.
This model is embodied in the commercial SCM system Aide-de-Camp.
Christopher
----
Christopher Seiwald P3 Software http://www.p3.com
seiwald@p3.com f-f-f-fast SCM 1-510-865-8720