RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Versioning

["Boos, Paul M." <PAUL dot M dot BOOS at saic dot com>]

Gisbert,

We are in the process of building just such a version management system
(although for technical documentation) using Apache Slide.  If you would
like, perhaps it would be best to discuss this off the list.

Cheers!
Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: Gisbert Amm [mailto:gia at webde-ag dot de]
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2003 2:08 AM
To: 'Mark Brand'; docbook-apps at lists dot oasis-open dot org
Subject: RE: DOCBOOK-APPS: Versioning


> I have a question about versioning of DocBook documents. 

> 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. 
>
> It appears to be a similar problem to that of software version management.
>
That's quite right.

> Questions:
> Does DocBook have any facility to manage this type of versioning?
> 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?

Perhaps you could use the 'role' attribute for this purpose, but you'll
probably end up duplicating parts of the text.

I'd suggest a version management tool like CVS (http://www.cvshome.org/). 

You could tag every version and check out the different versions into
different files / directories to create the documents from.

Regards
Gisbert Amm