On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Pavel Sanda <sa...@lyx.org> wrote: > fyi as there were previously some discussions about cooperation philosophies > we > should adopt for lyx and certain fever about letter-by-letter online > synchronization represented by Wave at its prime-time lets not overlook the > fate of this tool, which somewhat confirm my conviction that VCS as a colab > tool will stay with us for some more time ;)
Surely LyX is closer to "Google Docs"? I understand the problem with wave had little to do with letter-by-letter online synchronization, and a lot to do with people being confused as to what wave is actually for: chat? We have plenty of chat clients. Also, being dog slow and chewing up 500MB for a single tab didn't help either. I don't currently have a use for online synchronization, but lets not forget that there are many weaknesses in the current model of collaborating via VCS. Some of these were discussed previously, for your reference I include an example "tale of woe" below. Clearly there are any number of ways to mitigate these problems, but there is one obvious way to eliminate them completely: automatically propagate the latest version of the document to each machine used to edit the document, before the user has the chance to make incompatible changes on the other machines they use. -- Example Tale of Woe -- I find it quite easy to accidentally do something like: Desktop: Make changes in file A Desktop: svn ci Laptop: svn up (time passes) Laptop: Switch to a LyX window on my laptop (which already has an old version loaded) Laptop: Make a minor change and save Laptop: svn ci Svn then happily reverts the changes made on my desktop. If I notice this, then I have the option of merging the files. Unfortunately diffs of LyX files tend not to be that useful, as the context looks something like this: >\end_layout > >\begin_layout Standard >\begin_inset CommandInset citation >\LatexCommand cite >key "GabbayKuruczWolterZakharyaschev2002" > >\end_inset >: >\end_layout > >\begin_layout Standard Did I really want to cite Gabbay et. al. there? Or should I have cited Wolter 2002? The context is no use at all. So I use the new experimental LyX document compare feature. But that is still a little confusing: I tell it to compare with foo.lyx but without telling me it opens the stale foo.lyx.emergency confusing me further. It also does nothing about the changes in the Document settings. -- John C. McCabe-Dansted
