Xarg blog Archive

I saw a mention of a really nice article by David Wheeler titled Comments on Software Configuration Management (SCM) Systems. We have talked about switching to something better than CVS for OpenACS development but I don't think collectively we have the will to do it yet. I played with arch some and I certainly found it difficult to get used to the naming conventions it requires and the fiddly nature of setting up an archive but I agree with David Wheelers conclusion:

Personally, although I'd be happy to use subversion on others' projects, I personally plan to use GNU Arch; its warts are numerous, but I think they'll be rapidly fixed and GNU Arch has a tremendous amount of promise.

There is a beautiful presentation on “visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors” from the Collaborative User Experience Research group at IBM (via Object Learning). I think the diagrams have a particular Tufteian beauty.

I would love to have a tool like this for the OpenACS source. Sort of like colored diff in cvsweb but extended over all versions. Of course in CVS you have the added complication of branching an merging but even so it would be cool. I love things that expose the history of documents and foster that sense of shared ownership and collaboration and it's hard to imagine something more effective than this tool.