Re: [office] Change tracking requirements comments

[André Rebentisch <andre.rebentisch@arsaperta.com>]

Am 17.03.2012 20:31, schrieb robert_weir@us.ibm.com:
> 22, reuse of existing version control mechanisms -- I think this was
> based on an observation that an application could simply embedded
> something like git and have a very fully-featured way of tracking
> versions, merging changes from different users, etc. 

The idea was to avoid a reinvention of the wheel:
-------------------------------------------------
* Multiple existing software stacks exist which efficiently implement
the functionality of plain text versioning. All the functionality for
versioning exists.
* The technical difficulties (e.g. digital signatures, multi-user
editing, branching etc.) are already implemented and maturated.
* Years and years of industry experience, both from an implementation
and the user side. All tech. options have been debated, researched and
tried out.
* Standardization efforts for versioning do exist.

In principle, you could unzip an ODF file, store it in any common
versioning solution, and zip a revision checkout to generate the ODF.
Proof of concept is implementation-wise trivial for developers.

> But we need to ensure
> that as a standard ODF remains application neutral.  If there were an
> actual standard for the storage of version control, info, then that
> would be more interesting.

The approach would limit the challenge of the ODF TC to defining an
interface to a versioning provider: odfDAV.

For WebDAV a similar approach was followed.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3253
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918
etc. HTML and ODF are not a long way away from each other.

Best,
André