ubuntuone-users team mailing list archive

[Natan Yellin <aantny@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Elliot Murphy <elliot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 10/01/2009 05:01 PM, HAORANSKY wrote:
> > One more thing I want to mention is:
> > -I am a university student, and we do have team projects for computer
> > science, and we used to share one dropbox account to use with svn(team
> > job development), I know this sounds kind of redundant, but it actually
> > worked better for us instead of just use svn. Now after all the crap
> > before this sentence, here comes the point: Is there any chance of a
> > kind of U1 account for team/group purpose in the future?
>
> The way I envision this working is that someone in the team creates a
> shared folder for the team, and just shares it out to everyone with
> read/write access. I'd love to hear back about whether this works OK for
> your use case, or if there are problems with it that we might be able to
> fix.
>
It's more than a bit off topic, but I've always wished that things would be
a bit different. Shared folders are useful, but what really make revision
control systems so useful to developers is the fact that you can version
files and not simply share them with the rest of your team- If we want to
make a better operating system for users, there's really no need to look far
for innovation: Why not just give users the very gifts (bzr, git, etc.)
which we love so much ourselves and can't live without?

Yes, implementing a "Human" DCVS isn't easy. Dropbox, Apple's Time Machine,
and several other projects have all *tried* to to do so, but as far as I can
tell they haven't succeeded. (It's gotten to the point where Dropbox decided
that it just wasn't worth keeping file-revisions and now deletes revisions
more than one month old. I haven't heard anyone complain, so I doubt that
the feature was at all popular.) Both Dropbox and Time Machine remember
small one-line edits that no one cares about. Its been impossible to create
a "Human" GUI for viewing revisions because there are just too darn many
revisions to be viewed.

I think, however, that there's an easy solution:
1) Autosave every single document in every single application. Opening
documents should open them exactly how they were last time you edited them.
You should never need to save your work, and undo/redo should work even
after you close a document and open it up again.

(It is rather silly that we've gotten to the point where people use Tomboy
to write full-scale documents simply because Tomboy autosaves and OpenOffice
and Abiword don't.)

2) Add a new "Hard Save" button to every application. Clicking on it should
save/commit document that you can get back to later. Let people add notes to
each snapshot so that they can find what they're looking for later on.

Someday it'll happen. I can't work on it at the moment, but maybe that'll
change in the near future, which is why I thought it was worth mentioning on
this list.

Natan