[Sugar-devel] GSoC Groupthink Update: SharedTextDemo-4

[Walter Bender]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Benjamin M.
Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Walter Bender wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Benjamin M.
>> Schwartz<bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>>> 1. Any session saved in the Journal that was previously shared, will be shared
>>> again with the same scope upon resume.
>>> 2. If there is an existing shared session visible with the same activity_id, the
>>> activity will join that session.
>>>
>>> This behavior is good enough for me.  However, it does preclude users from
>>> working privately on the results of a shared session, unless they totally
>>> deactivate their network connection.  I could add this ability to work
>>> privately to groupthink's GroupActivity superclass, or it could be added to
>>> sugar's Activity class.  A number of other interesting behaviors, such as
>>> forking an existing document, are also unavailable in the present system.
>>
>> Maybe an option for "keep" could be to "keep a private copy"?
>
> I think this makes sense.  "Keep a copy" would reset the sharing scope to
> private, and create a new activity_id.  It's hard to reason about, but I
> think this makes sense for a versioned datastore as well, where creating a
> copy is only necessary if you want to break the history (otherwise Keep is
> sufficient to make a checkpoint in the version history).
>
> However, this still doesn't allow temporary private work.  In order to be
> able to work privately on a shared document, and then later merge it back
> into the shared stream, users would need to be able to choose to work
> privately for a single session, without altering the activity_id.  It's
> not yet clear to me how important this feature is.
>
> --Ben
>
>

A private copy can be shared again. So it seems the real question is
one of merging. If each of us are working on different versions and we
want to share again, we need some reconciliation mechanism. I would
argue that for the time being, that should be a manual process.

-walter

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org