Confessions of a researchaholic

August 23, 2017

Revision control based on lines vs operations

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:52 am
Tags:

I cannot believe I have not (really) noticed this earlier, but the current git/svn revision controls are based on simple line differences, without taking into account the actual editing operations which we actually did in SIGGRAPH 2011 for image editing.

As a very simple example, say a file contains an original line like this:

I love you. Do you love me?

User 1 breaks the line into two:

I love you.
Do you love me?

User 2 adds one word the line:

I love you. Do you love me too?

A revision control tool that considers editing operations can automatically merge the two edits:

I love you.
Do you love me too?

While the current svn/git tools, based on line differences, will simply give up and ask users for manual intervention.

1 Comment »

  1. On that topic you might be interested in reading about CRDT:
    https://github.com/ipfs/research-CRDT

    Comment by jdumas — September 9, 2017 @ 5:58 am | Reply


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