Hi,
I read the proposal several times and I'm unconvinced: it seems complex
even in the simplest case, UI heavy and leaves lots of questions
unanswered: what happens if the user has no time to resolve the
conflicts right now? what if other edits coming from other users pile up
while trying to resolve the previous conflicts? will the conflict UI be
active as long as the user(s) does not resolve them one way or another
(ignore/resolve)? if a conflict is ignored, will a future update
reactivate the same conflicts again? (looks like it will). Will a future
update eventually wipe out the ignored conflicts? (actually we have this
problem for any edit that is not sent out with an Update under the
server wins policy)
It seems to me that the proposal would work in a simple 2 users
situations but in the asynchronous world of Chandler/Cosmo where a bunch
of users are sending updates all the time, I don't see this workable at
all. It's like trying to svn edit a heavily edited file, you get the
conflict dialog every time you try to commit. Devs tend to live with
this (code has a sort of sacred aura to it and getting it right is
important) but users of a calendar are unlikely to be as patient.
The more I look at the problem and the more I think we can't avoid a
real versioning of the entire item so to avoid data loss and allow users
to manually "merge" (i.e. choose) between conflicting versions of
something without too much hand holding by the system through a complex
UI (the per attribute conflict resolution seems to me really UI heavy
since changes throughout a bunch of attributes do usually have some
consistency so you will likely end up choosing one version against
another as a whole, not on a per attribute basis).
I know that historization/versioning (think of it as the list of edits
at the bottom of a Wiki page from a UI standpoint) has been punted long
time ago but it seems to be less complex than the current proposal from
a user/UI standpoint though, from a data/model standpoint, it's likely
to be more complex.
Thoughts?
- Philippe
Mimi Yin wrote:
As promised, here is a quick mock-up of the conflict resolution UI in
the Notes field:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/ConflictResolution#NotesField
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