Hi Jean,
More questions. Still trying to grasp what Alfresco versioning can and
cannot do. Sorry if I'm thick, but I doubt I'm the only person reading
this thread that is confused or unclear on the topic.
It also took me a while to get my head around versioning when I first
encountered CVS and SVN.
I guess one could think about it like this:
Imagine you've got a nice, friendly wooden table as a desktop. On it,
you've got an empty in-tray.
Now imagine you've got a robot who deals with serving you documents
from the in-box, and with putting them back in again after you've
written something on them.
You take a clean sheet of paper and write a note on it. At the top of
the document, you give it the title, "Notes". You're done with it, and
tell the robot to put it in the in-box. The robot does so, and puts a
post-it on the sheet of paper with a note that this is version 1 of
the document called "Notes".
10 minutes later, you want to add another note to the sheet of paper.
You tell the robot. The robot duplicates the document and puts the
duplicate copy on your desktop.
You write another note, and you're done. You tell the robot to store
the document back in the in-box. Obligingly, the robot takes the
duplicated document with your additional note, and stacks it back in
the in-box on top of the first sheet, putting a post-it on the new
copy saying that this is version 2 of the document called "Notes".
Later, you want to edit that note. You tell the robot to give you your
"Notes" document. The robot duplicates version 2 of the "Notes"
document (without putting any post-it on it) and puts it on your
desktop. You scribble out a couple of words and, over the top, you add
a couple of better words. You're done, and you tell the robot.
The robot takes the document, adds a post-it saying "Version 3", and
puts it on the stack, which is now 3 sheets high.
A few minutes later, you didn't like the change you made. Because the
robot is keeping versions, you could ask it for the last version it
filed away ("Version 3" on the post-it), or for the version before
that ("Version 2" on the post-it). In the end, you ask for "Version
2". The robot duplicates the document with the post-it marked "Version
2", and puts it on your desktop (without a post-it).
You make some changes and add a new note. You then tell the robot to
file the document away, and it does so: it adds a post-it "Version 4"
to the document, and adds it to the top of the stack.
You now have an in-box with a stack of 4 copies of the sheet of paper,
with each copy being a version of the document after retrieving it,
doing some work on it, and then re-filing it in the in-box.
That's a very simplistic way of looking at the basic process.
In the case of Alfresco, you can see the version number (i.e. the
version from the version control system's viewpoint) in the little
black label to the right of the document name in the repository
browser.
If you click on the document title or document thumbnail, you go to
that document's preview and details page. On that page, in the
right-hand column, you can see a list of the various versions of the
document, the name of the person that uploaded that version, and any
notes they left when they uploaded it.
When uploading versions of a document, it would be important for each
submitter to add at least brief notes about the current considered
status of the document and what work the person has done. That will
help other human beings keep track of the collaboration.
Also, updating the meta data in a document regularly after doing work
on it is another way of providing information about its current
status.
Alfresco will happily display that meta data on
http://media.libreoffice.org (as well as in the document's preview and
details page).
There are a couple of introductions to version control systems here:
- http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/
- http://guides.beanstalkapp.com/version-control/intro-to-version-control.html
I'll reply to your other questions in a separate post.