dhis2-documenters team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there.

Now that there has been some additional contributions to the
documentation branch, I wanted to take some time to review the
feasibility of concurrent editing. Here are my initial findings. The
Viet Nam team has produced a document on the Excel Report module and I
wanted to make a few changes to it. Their document was created in
Serna Free, and I was using XXE as my editor. It appears that there
are some differences between the behaviour of the two editors. XXE
seems to have a habit of "pretty printing" the XML in the source file
itself, and adds a lot of white space to the document. It also appears
to add an "align=center" to each image reference. This creates pretty
serious issues when it comes to merging the documents back together.
Now, I suppose we could try and perform a three-way merge with a diff
tool like Meld, Vim or many of the others, but it seems to be a bit of
an overkill, especially if we want as many users to get involved with
the documentation as possible, and not limit it strictly to developers
and geeks that may be familiar with such tools. Also, it is just a
waste of time to try and perform a three-way merge on a document where
the majority of changes is to white spac


So, with this in mind, I would say that we should probably not use XXE
given that it makes "silent" changes to the document that really make
merges much more difficult than they should be. Serna Free, for those
that want something prettier than vi (can anything be more pretty??) ,
seems to be free, runs on Windows and Linux. It does insert an
annoying little message at the top of the document that it was created
with Serna Free, but I suppose this is something that we can live
with.

I guess there is no way to prevent people from using whatever editor
they want, but I am dumping XXE on these grounds, and will consider to
take up Bob on his emacs challenge.

Regards,
jason