[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Is CVS A Practical Means to Manage XML Versions In AProduc
"whereas XML documents usually don't have unique IDs." I must be confused. Unique id/idref management is one of the problems to be solved although I wasn't looking at a version control system to do that. It is one of the tricky bits of using XSL (say and XSL-FO) because of autogenerating numbers (say work package numbers) from id/idrefs where the person redlining the document for changes (manually) refers to WP numbers but the actual relationship is denoted by id/idref values that are NOT the same numbers. It's one of the challenges of using the DTD/Schema as the governing authority yet the XSL determines the actual end product. This is a different topic and not discussed often enough when training people to use these technologies. There is a separate problem for procurement but I won't take that up at this time. Safe to say, far too many CDRLs are pointing into black holes. len Quoting "Johannes.Lichtenberger" <Johannes.Lichtenberger@uni-konstanz.de>: > On 09/17/2011 03:02 PM, David Lee wrote: >> What it *doesn't* do is 'intelligent' diffs and versioning. A classic >> case is someone may simply load a xml file into and editor and save it, >> without changing any 'xml stuff' but whitespace may change and cause the >> file to be versioned and presumed 'different'. Does that matter ? It >> depends on your needs. > > Yes, it all depends. I think the OP might not be interested in > tree-aware or XML-aware diffs and integrated query mechanisms. That is > also ACID properties which are usually guaranteed through transactions > in database systems -- or CAP in NoSQL systems. But yeah, I'm more > interested in the database/storage part and maybe a bit biased ;-) > >> For our needs it doesn't matter at all. We just needed document management >> at a document level and as long as the files are not corrupted and we can >> assign unique versions and label and pull them, it works great. Now if >> you want to question say 'what XML element changed and by what' then a text >> based version control won't answer that, but you can use other (non version >> control) XML diff tools, pull the 2 versions and diff them. Also if you >> want the system to not create a new version unless the document has >> semantically changed it won't do that. > > Hm, you also have to remember that such diff tools really compute diffs > and can't be used for change detection (for instance they may try to > generate minimal edit scripts, but an optimal tree-to-tree correction > algorithm is known to have a CPU runtime complexity of O(n^3) and it may > still not be what a user really has changed, that is most of the tools > use some kind of heuristics to speed up the diff-computation but may in > certain cases fail horribly, for example data-oriented XML is almost > always a problem). If you want to determine the changes a user really > has done you must have unique node IDs, whereas XML documents usually > don't have unique IDs. > > ID-based algorithms are usually also much quicker. > > Furthermore even XML diff tools aren't sufficient if the user wants to > have an overview about the changes, but all of that may not be what the > OP wants anyway ;-) > > But as a side note -- with time aware XPath or even XQuery-extensions a > versioned XML-DBS can be used to analyse time-dependent data, which > might be significant in many areas. What do others think? > > best regards, > Johannes > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@lists.xml.org > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@lists.xml.org > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php > >
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