[Owncloud] Suggestions

[iberlynx]

Sure, I'm not saying git is imperative, although git IIRC merges all kinds of text, not just code, and office (XML) files are just text wright? And is pretty fast.
My point was that IMHO, there should be no need to slow the interface down because of locking, since we can fix the inconsistencies with an intelligent merge algorithm.
I agree with you that a context (from structured media) aware (something like the duchain of kdevelop) solution would simplify things a bit.
But still i think git is wright in not merging within the same line, because if two people do opposing changes in the same line, we've got a problem. Maybe the solution lies with the standard highlighting the line that the other user is editing, which is already an intuitive visual deterrent for editing that line, combined with the locking of only that highlighted line. So if the user for example tries to change formatting of a whole paragraph which contains said highlighted line (other user is editing), the interface just flashes and gives out some kind of warning that you can't edit the same line other users are editing remotely, and asks: do you wish to 1. don't apply formatting, 2. apply formatting to the rest of the lines, 3. suggest the other user to apply formatting to the whole block?
The rest of the text should be totally free to edit everything with no latency at all.

what do you say?

On Thursday 15 July 2010 00:22:57 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
> On 14 July 2010 22:43, iberlynx <iberlynx at lavabit.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > you say git is not the way to go because you only consider it in the pessimistic approach. But have you thought of using git or some similarly powerful diff engine with an optimistic approach?
> >
> > Let me give you my proposal:
> > Every user action be it a single character change or a block change or a formatting change is automatically git-committed and git-pushed to the other users, which would automatically git-merge the changes as git does so well. So no locking would be required, hence no latency problem.
> > (This would additionally solve the problem you stated with non atomic changes!)
> > The only obstacle that I foresee is that IIRC git doesn't merge changes on the same line, but I'm sure that there's a way to tailor git's algorithm for this specific use-case!
> >
> > Am I just being my usual self, and this is a crazy idea? Or does it make sense to you as well?
> 
> Hi;
> Just a though:
> Do we need as heavy waepon as git for this simple non-conflicing case?
> As you admitted, nontrivial (real) cases need extensions/hooks to git,
> the same that would also be needed for other version control tools. Is
> there anything special about git that helps in collaborative editing
> of documents?
> 
> Regarding extensions for merging at text level, please note that git
> or similar tools are for source code, character-based media; for
> structured media even merging tables is nontrivial in general case.
> IMHO it's worth to consider locking feature at local level (paragraph
> or table) than accepting any edits and then trying to merge.
> 
>