IRC log from today's meeting - 2014-07-30

[Svante Schubert <svante.schubert@gmail.com>]

Our next meeting will be on the 13th of August:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingdetails.html?year=2014&month=08&day=13&hour=14&min=30&sec=0&p1=179&p2=37&p3=136&p4=234&iv=1800
The teleconference login data for next call will be found in the OASIS calendar event - hopefully someone of IBM is able to initialize the call:
Phone numbers are listed in the calendar invite:  https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/office/calendar.php 
Chat room for meeting is at:  http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room/odf


Please find some notes of today's meeting below: 

Attendees: John,  Svante

Summertime take its toll. At least John and I had a pleasant technical conversation.
In the end of the call, I provided my current view on Dennis' mail to the comment list.

I suggested to John (and hereby to the SC) that I will meet Dennis in person at the ACM conference face to face and report the SC afterwards.
His position paper still seems sometimes vague to me, but I will be able to clarify all my remaining questions directly at the conference.

From my current view it has the same fundamental design draw backs as ECT once use to have. Although it is a possible valid solution for change-tracking, it neglects to solve other actual demands of the "post floppy disc era". His solution will require similar effort to application vendors, but will not solve other demanding problems as merge, automated testing and ODF real-time collaboration (RTC) among various ODF applications. Instead of fixing broken design (of former change-tracking), we should provide instead a mapping from the old to the new one ODF change-tracking and provide this mapping to OASIS. Our current solution addressing multiple problem fields at the same time is far better, following the rule of thumb of software development to reduce redundancy, the reuse of modules and techniques.

The two major design draw-backs of Dennis' approach:

1. It is based on tracking the XML and not based on tracking changes of "high level user semantic units" (in other words - no abstraction of the ODF XML) there is no reuse for real-time collaboration RTC, no interoperability across applications, which are using a different internal model as XML.
   
2. There are no references to the places, where the changes occurred. In other words no operations referring to those semantic units (referenced absolute from the start of the document), enabling operational transformation: the ease of merge, especially the ability of merging of changes, without the need to know (& parse) the arbitrary large ODF content.
   

I will discuss all this with him in person.

Best regards,

Svante