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Version Control

Version control is something essential for cooperative work. Exodus [13], the multi-user object oriented database toolkit used in the implementation of the Microcosm Unix linkbases has already got some primitive version control for objects stored inside it. We created a version control mechanism for the links using Exodus facilities, combined with RCS (Revision Control System) to control the version of the node. Although the contents of nodes are normal Unix files, the linkbase stores a reference for each node as an object in order to identify the node's author, the RCS version, date, set of selections etc. The links, and source anchors are also stored as objects, for details see [15] and Section2. At the moment, we offer version control at the linkbase level, meaning that a new version for all nodes and links is created when the user decides to create a new version. Each version can be seen as a layer, and it is possible to implement mechanism to allow navigation between different versions/layers. We could imagine a hypermedia application where different versions were created to reflect different levels of complexity and detais. Readers could jump from one version to another accordingly to the amount of detail that they would like to see as a result of a follow link. For CSCW, each user could have a different version of the entire hypermedia to work on for future merge.



Fri Dec 8 14:41:14 GMT 1995