[sugar] adding versions to journal/datastore

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:44 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at tomeuvizoso.net> wrote:
>> Hi Eben and other sugarites,
>>
>> I'm trying to find a simple way to add some version support to the
>> journal, but for that I need to know what's the sweetest spot (no pun
>> intended) between value and complexity.
>>
>> I'm thinking about making the next notable changes to the UI:
>>
>> - the journal list shows one line per "interesting" entry. Interesting
>> entries are tips of branches and a branch is created every time the
>> user clicks the Keep button or resumes an entry. Activities can also
>> choose to make a branch in behalf of the user at any moment, for
>> example just before the user selects "Erase all" in Paint,
>
> I'm want to become a bit clearer with your terminology, because I'm
> not sure that branches line up in my mind.

I used the term branch just to put the idea in known terms, but the
important part is in which occasions an entry is marked as
"interesting". I think I didn't do a good job at explaining myself, so
will try again:

In the current Journal, we always overwrite older information except
when the user clicks the 'Keep' button. I think we agree this is not
the most desirable situation, as being able to inspect the
intermediate states is important for reflecting about the creation
process.

If we stop overwriting and keep updating entries as often as we do
now, we'll have lots of more entries in the journal list. And most of
them won't be relevant to the user. We can improve this situation by
showing just a subset of all the stored entries in the list view and
let the user only access all the entries in the detailed view of an
entry.

How do we determine which are the entries in this subset of
"interesting" entries?

- we let the user tell us with the Keep button,
- consider the last entry written in a session as interesting,
- mark (or rather, don't unmark/overwrite) an entry as interesting
when it is resumed.

Regards,

Tomeu