Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?

[Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au>]

On 27/02/2011 3:08 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> Cthun <cthun_117@qmail.net.au> writes:
>> Oh, really? I for one cannot recall ever seeing a version 1.5 of a
>> novel or a version 2.0 of a magazine article.
>
> Well, I've been responsible for the typesetting software for "Die
> Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Ernst Troeltsch"
> [anecdote trimmed]
>
> So definitely there were various versions of the same article published.

But that's not the same thing as software versioning, or anywhere close.

> The gestation of both articles and novels is rarely linear.

True enough. But it is also not going to fit especially well to what 
systems designed for software revision control do. There is a single 
long piece of text rather than lots of interacting software modules, for 
one thing; there are no builds or library dependencies or bug reports or 
feature requests. There's also a point where it's actually *finished*, 
while software is never finished and has many successive versions 
released, each fixing the bugs in the previous and adding new features.

In short there's almost nothing of what source code control systems are 
actually there for. If you want to be able to recover deleted material 
you use strikethru (and delete anything still in strikethru when it's 
done) or cut it and save it to a clippings file or something.