Dennis E. Hamilton wrote on Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 19:20:13 -0700: > BACK STORY > > On a different list, not just here on ooo-dev, there has been some > surprise to see us putting binaries (ODF documents) into some SVN > locations used by the PPMC. > > My impression is that the experienced hands here in ASF are expecting > to see DIFFs in commit messages on SVN, but binaries don't get DIFFed > since it is usually unintelligible and almost always uninteresting. > For some, it is new news that ODF packages are not XML files. > > Someone suggested that one could unpack the Zip of these documents and > then do diffs of the respective XML parts and that could serve as > a DIFF on what the changes are. They also noticed they'd never seen > that done. > > THE INSIGHT > > On seeing that suggestion (clearly the kinds of things developers > think of, it being what we do), it struck me that we have a geeks are > from Mars, users are from Venus situation here. > > I think the clash of expectations has to do with the differences in > tools that are applicable at the level we work at, and how we see what > it is we are at work on. > > We need to understand that we really have different experience sets, > and they all are important in the context of the OpenOffice.org > project. > > A GEEKY LOOK > > Here is a geeky explanation of why it does no good to figure out > a better way to show DIFFs of the XML inside an ODF package if you > want to know what an author contributor/committer changed. (You might > want that as a forensics tool, but not for knowing what someone > changed in the course of their work on a document.) > > My (updated) explanation: >
Long email. In the end, the expectation is for commit mails to contain reviewable diffs, I don't think you've addressed how that might be done? (as opposed to how it shouldn't be done)
