[docbook-apps] Re: Versioning

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

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/ Mark Brand <mark dot brand at elegalpublishing dot com> was heard to say:
| Some Background Info:
| I have a master copy of government legislation (called an Act)  in DocBook format. Now the guvment makes amendments to the Act (An amendment is a textual change to the original Act  - could  be  Addition, Removal or Modification of text). What I am required to do is supply a consolidated act (i.e The Original Act + all amendments) and also supply a means by which users can see the Act at a point in time. 
|
| For Example: 
|     Original Act published 27-Oct-2001
|     Amendment 01 published 12-Dec-2001
|     Amendment 02 published 15-July-2002
|     Amendment 03 published 4-Dec-2002
[...]
| It appears to be a similar problem to that of software version management.
|
| Questions:
| Does DocBook have any facility to manage this type of versioning?

Yes and no. There's a global attribute, revisionflag, that can be used
to mark changes of this sort. But if you have additions and then
deletions and then re-additions, you're going to have to add markup,
sometimes quite carefully.

I know some folks who built a full-blown legislative application. It
was highly non-trivial.

| Does anyone know of any tools that can be integrated into a current browser based application to solve this problem?
| Does anyone have any idea of the best way to solve this problem?

Several people suggested CVS. That would let you keep track of the
versions, but it wouldn't provide any mechanism to show the changes.
I'm guessing that the folks who look at intermediate versions want to
see change bars and strike-outs so CVS isn't going to be sufficient.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>      | Where are we going? And why am I
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | in this handbasket?--Toto
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |
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