At 11:52 AM 12/21/2006 -0800, Mitch Kapor wrote:
perhaps modifying the Notes field of the event in some
fashion to show the conflicting information. This could be done by
appending a section to the Notes field with details of the conflict.
The user could then manually fix up the item as needed.
One possible problem with this is that it would likely lead to a new edit
conflict on the Notes field itself. And if the original conflict were on
the Notes field, recording the details of the conflict in the Notes field
could actually triple its size. If the changed notes were then sent back
to the other users, they might edit it and create new conflicts, creating a
mess.
If the Notes field is the most likely source of edit conflicts to begin
with, it seems like it would be better to use standard edit merging
techniques as are used in programmers' revision control tools, to allow
changes to non-overlapping areas to be automatically merged, and then
including markers like this::
<<<<<<< joe 12/05/2006
blah blah blah
=======
yada yada yada
>>>>>>> bob 12/03/2006
To indicate sections where both 'joe' and 'bob' edited that portion of the
notes. This approach might produce less conflict and duplication than
simply adding a change log to the beginning or end of the notes, in the
case where the conflict is in the notes themselves.
(I should mention, however, that implementing this idea is nontrivial on
several levels, so this is more of a future idea than one for short-term
implementation.)
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