[pmwiki-users] Burnt! Simultaneous edit lost :-(

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 10:07:49PM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> > I kinda like this last idea.  It might even be worthwhile to
> > display the page history even when the merge does succeed,
> > since otherwise it's not at all obvious what changed if there
> > weren't any conflicts.
> 
> [...]
> Of course, this doesn't work if there's no diff available. 

There almost *has* to be a diff available,  unless an admin
is turning off the page history entirely, in which case I think
the admin has bigger issues than this one.  :-)  Short of that,
I can't imagine how we would possibly be arriving at this situation
without a diff of some sort.

> In which case 
> the diff will degenerate into a "this is the page as it was saved by 
> somebody else in the mean time; please integrate your changes into his".

I'm afraid I totally don't understand this part.  Regardless of the
availability of a diff, the edit form always should come back with the 
text as the author just submitted it (possibly with others' changes 
merged in), and never lose what the author has just submitted.  Any
other behavior is too author unfriendly/surprising.

> Um... thinking a bit further: if a lazy user gets such a page, he'll 
> probably hit the "save" button anyway, overwriting the other guy's 
> changes. So it's time for some ergonomic trickery: Display the other 
> guy's changes in the edit window, and the lazy guy's changes as source 
> text below. This also punishes those who start editing a page and leave 
> it open while away for lunch, which is what we want.

This puts the punishment in absolutely the wrong place (nor do I think
it's consistent with PmWiki Philosophy #1 to be punishing any author :-).

Consider: If I make a very long set of changes to a page, hit "Save", 
and while I was doing my long writing someone else saved a minor
edit such as fixing a typo, then under the above scenario I would
basically have to re-apply all of my lengthy edits simply because
someone else changed a single character while I was making them.  
To me, that's backwards.

Pm