[Zope-CMF] Versioned Documents (was: Workflow first cut is ready)

[Tres Seaver]

albert boulanger wrote:


>    > I've been thinking about a Versioned Document capability a lot recently as
>    > I've been trying to understand how to use CMS as a Document Management
>    > system. Most of the pieces of Document Management are there (especially now
>    > with customizable workflow). One missing piece is Versioned Documents.
>    > 
>    > Versioned Documents differ from Zope Versions in several respects.
>    > 
>    > 1. Versions older than the current version must continue exist until they
>    > are explicitly deleted. You don't want a Pack operation to clean them out
>    > inadvertently.
>    > 
>    > 2. Older versions may need special treatment in the catalog. You may not
>    > want them cluttering the catalog; you may or may not want them retrievable
>    > via a catalog search.
>    > 
>    > 3. Older versions must be retrievable. For example, we sometimes need to
>    > send older manual versions to customers who are using older versions of our
>    > products.
>    > 
>    > 4. It may be desirable to put a slight barrier in front of older versions,
>    > so that an older version is not retrieve accidently in place of a newer
>    > version. Or in other words, by default you always get the most current
>    > document, but you can get an older one with some additional effort (or
>    > syntax).
>    > 
>    > 5. In some respects, all versions should be accessible by the same ID. For
>    > example, when a new version of a document is published, users should get the
>    > newest version when following the URL that they stored for an older version.
>    > In other respects, each version must be separately identifiable; for
>    > example, in a workflow various versions of a document may exist
>    > simultaneously with different workflow status.
>    > 
>    > I hope others will chime in if I missed any essential points.
>    > 
>    > -- Loren
> 
>    Maybe writing a Zope storage adapter front end for CVS would be the
>    right solution here?  I have to admit that for certain kinds of
>    documents (e.g. source code) I will not tolerate anything but CVS for
>    storage.
> 
>    I have no idea how realistic this idea is.
> 
> I would also want its semantics to be compatible with the W3C effort to
> add versioning to web-dav.


Funny you should mention that.... Paul has been lobbying on an off to
have Zope work as a Subversion server.  "Subversion",
   http://subversion.tigris.org/
  uses a subset of the "DeltaV" versioning extensions for WebDAV to
provide a superset of CVS' behavior; we already support most of the
semantics in the ZODB.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@digicool.com
Digital Creations     "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.org