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

[Joachim Werner]

> > I've been trying to understand how to use CMS as a Document Management
> > system. Most of the pieces of Document Management are there (especially
now
> > with customizable workflow). One missing piece is Versioned Documents.

> 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 have no idea how realistic this idea is.

Hi Guido!

We have already tried out using LocalFS with CVS support in our Proiektor
groupware project. It was just a hack, but it worked. Basically it should be
not too difficult to write a real "CVS DA", though somebody might wish to
write a decent Python-CVS library first. But when I looked into how CVS
works in detail, I came to the conclusion that it might not really be
suitable for high-volume document handling in a Document management system
(DMS):

In most cases, a DMS is going to replace a traditional file storage (e.g.
shared department folders on an NFS or SMB server). This means that a lot of
people will check in and out all the documents they are working on. CVS has
to rebuild a certain version of a document at checkout time, so it might not
to be suited for this kind of traffic.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of download traffic directly from
the CVS on sites like mozilla.org. So I am a bit confused whether it would
be better to integrate CVS into Zope or just take the functionality offered
by CVS and integrate it into the ZODB natively.

Currently the latter seems the better option to me.

Cheers

Joachim