Am Donnerstag, den 15.09.2005, 16:18 -0400 schrieb Jack Carroll: > The reason I hesitated to suggest just using an off-the-shelf data > base system is that I've seen too many cases of lost and corrupted records > in inventory systems, even those running on high-end IBM data bases. They > seem to be designed to stay up-to-date with a fast-changing business, but > not necessarily to prevent permanent loss of the record of a single event, > if it doesn't get detected before the oldest backup tape is recycled.
That's what version control systems were explicitly designed for. You can even find all four fields of the number log provided natively: date of the change, person doing the change, description of the change and the actual changed content. Note: I don't suggest abusing the metadata to store log contents, just pointing out how the design requirements of version control systems match those of the number log. SVN provides out of the box: * remote access, * atomic changes, * complete history of all changes, which implies changes are immutable yet easy to correct, while the correction itself gets logged too. What it does _not_ provide out of the box is the enforcement of allowed changes. For this, I just found out, there already are hooks: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch05s02.html#svn-ch-5-sect-2.1 If we want to roll something of our own, I suggest not starting from scratch but starting with SVN and writing a hook script which checks that every change made to the number log only adds one line at the end and that the added line has the allowed syntax. So far, this is merely matching the output of "diff" against a regular expression. But the script must also check that the added number is unique. Automatically inserting the right username and date would be a nice add-on too. Any scripting gurus lurking? - Viktor Pracht _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
