[Zope-CMF] Versioned Documents (was: Workflow first cut is ready)

[seb bacon]

* Loren Stafford <lstafford@morphics.com> [010524 01:58]:
> I'm not sure if the two classes of "document" could fit into the same
> "document management system". For our purposes, we have decided: No. At
> least we won't try to make a system that fits both. Let CVS (and VSS) do
> what they already do (more or less) well. We want to solve the other
> problem: helping tech writers and marketeers control and publish their
> collateral on the web.

> > Maybe writing a Zope storage adapter front end for CVS would be the
> > right solution here?  I have to admit that for certain kinds of
> > documents (e.g. source code) I will not tolerate anything but CVS for
> > storage.

I agree with Loren's previous analysis of why a Versioning tool is a
different beast from Zope Versions.  

In summary:

 - a default view when called by id
 - arbitrarily long version history
 - versions participate in workflow, catalog etc in their own right
 - all content types to be able to have versions

I also agree that document storage has different requirements to
code storage.  There are other efforts to create a CVS interface to
the storage, although a CVS-native storage would be very interesting.
However, because of the requirements above, it would make more sense
to start with the above requirements, then perhaps extend the
resulting interface to embrace CVS afterwards, perhaps?

How would this be acheived, though?  One idea is a tool, but the
problem is that it wouldn't be transparent to the rest of the CMF -
everything would have to be tweaked to be 'version-aware'.  Another
option is to create a Versioning Mixin, which knows how to display
itself, index itself, etc.  It could be folderish and create
subobjects with automatic ids whenever a new version is requested.
(I'm thinking aloud here rather than presenting proper ideas :)
Thoughts?

Also, do people think I'm right that a versioning system which plays
with the workflow would create a proper framework for supporting 
're-editing' scenarios?  

seb