[Zope] RE: [Zope-dev] Re: source control

[Brian Lloyd]

> I think my idea of a mixing the two ideas of Zope Versions 
> and external
> source control has merit. A Version already encapsulates a 
> whole group of
> changes. It does this simply with all that is required is to join the
> Version and it collects all the changes after that. Then a 
> save performs the
> above operation of adding the changed objects to a snapshot 
> on disk and a
> cvs commit is run. This would require serialization of 
> commits but that
> isn't hard to do.


I think it would be a good idea for everyone interested in this
to take a look at the DAV Delta-V "Web Versioning Model" located
on the website of the DAV working group:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/


I found this model pretty well thought out, and once the Delta-V
group finishes baking this stuff we will be thinking about how
to integrate the underlying model in Zope. When that day comes, we
would get a couple of things "free":

  o support for a standard, documented web versioning model
    and automatic support for version-aware DAV tools

  o Zope infrastructure that would likely expose all of the 
    elements of the versioning model required to do alternate
    implementations. Think of this like the ZODB interfaces,
    where you have a static public interface but can change
    the implementation to handle storage in different ways
    (ODB, RDB, etc). 

    I can imagine a similar approach to versioning, where a 
    well-defined interface and versioning object model 
    would make it relatively easy to experiment with different
    back-end approaches.

Note that I'm *not* saying that folks shouldn't experiment with
doing their own things with versioning - I just want to relay
some of the thinking that has gone on here at DC on the subject.

Though we will probably not have the bandwidth to deal with this
versioning model stuff in the immediate future, we want to make
sure that the community knows where we are thinking of going in
the hope that we can all move in the same general direction.



Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com