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)
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