[copyleft-next] Redline

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Fri Feb 8 19:52:29 UTC 2013


On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Pamela Chestek <pchestek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I appreciate that redline is incompatible with Git and so is inappropriate
> for this project. But I am a bit puzzled by what seems to be antipathy to
> redline in general, which I just see as another form of version control and
> perhaps better suited to text documents that the Git functionality.

My main objection is that redline is more like a lossy facility for a
particular class of annotations than version control. When I really
want to see what has changed substantively between two word processor
files, I export to plain text and do a wdiff. I admit that for a small
number of people working intensively on a document over a short time
period, track changes can be more natural. But that's not what
copyleft-next is.

Not relevant for copyleft-next, but I'd love better, standard tooling
around version control, annotations, and Open Document Format
documents. Aren't in-house things along those lines one of the reason
for MSOffice lock-in at law firms? Purely conjecture and hearsay, I
have no knowledge of such things.

Mike


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