[sugar] A few more toolbar buttons for AbiWord?

[J.M. Maurer]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 11:31 -0500, Ivan Krsti? wrote:
> J.M. Maurer wrote:
> > That wouldn't be a requirement with abi collab. We can aggregate lots of
> > strokes (or better, in abi terms: ChangeRecords, thing "patches to the
> > document") if needed.
> 
> How does this deal with conflicts?

Most of the conflicts can be resolved by recalculating the document
positions that the characters should go in. The algorithm is pretty
similar to the one used in darcs.

> > We have that already sorted out for n people. Even with proper
> > undo/redo.
> 
> Is there a design doc somewhere for the way your collaboration works, or
> do I need to go read the source? 

Martin did the last revision of the code. We did have a design document,
but I think since the last revision it is out of date.

About undo/redo, let's quote Martin from one of my blog entries:

"It handles the case people making changes to other peoples text. We do
this by detecting that it has happened and preventing undo through the
remote user's changes. You can't undo a remote user's changes. Just your
own. If there is a conflict undo/redo prevents further undo/redo's.
However you are perfectly entitled to manually type over the remote
users changes or delete them etc."

> I'm very skeptical of things being as
> simple as you make them sound, because a colleague recently researched
> most of the published research on collaborative editing techniques, and
> found many of the problems I list to be generally still unsolved.

It's not like we just implemented this within a week or so. We've been
working on this since June _2005_.

Now if Martin could drop in to discuss the latest changes :)

  Marc