The use case is totally different. Say I'm a professor and I'm writing a grant proposal. I send a draft to a PhD student to proofread. Today the only practical way to do this is to use Word's "track changes" tool.
Basically, a proofreader
(i) gives you a lot of minuscule changes. A comma here, moving adverbs around there, etc. In a 10-page draft, there could be hundreds of suggestions.
(ii) only makes suggestions. I'm the one applying for the grant, so I need to explicitly approve (or reject) every single change individually. This probably won't work elegantly with `patch`.
(iii) changes individual words. Word actually records your changes as you make them. This is not the same as simply diff'ing version1 and version2. This helps me see the proofreader's point.
(iv) makes textual comments to explain changes. Or you simply need to annotate a paragraph as "I don't understand this." Maybe you need to offer different suggestions, depending on the author's meaning ("Perhaps your mean to say ...")
(v) makes different kinds of changes. "Diff" tracks changes on a line-line-basis. If you edit prose, you move around words, or lines, or even paragraphs. Basically, dealing with written language is more complicated and has more structure than source code.
(vi) does not typically have a need for a revision history. It is very rarely useful to look up when a certain sentence was introduced in a grant proposal. While it's useful to keep earlier versions as a backup (and Dropbox is enough for that), version control really is a solution looking for a problem when it comes to writing prose.
Source control is, relatively speaking, complicated. The people who make editorial comments on text - especially in the publishing world - are often not technical folk, and asking them all to learn and understand a new tool is decidedly non-trivial.
They can all type however. I can see this being useful.
You will be amazed at the number of publishers who run their editing process of Word documents because their change control is the closest their is to a common denominator.
Trying to teach someone non-technical how to use Git, even at the simplest of levels, is very, very difficult. I tried once for a project a friend and I were working on, and eventually gave up -- the learning curve was just too high for something he probably wouldn't use ever again.
This, however, would have been almost perfect: not too complicated, easy-to-teach, and portable.
Comments
Isn't version control better?
The use case is totally different. Say I'm a professor and I'm writing a grant proposal. I send a draft to a PhD student to proofread. Today the only practical way to do this is to use Word's "track changes" tool.
Basically, a proofreader
(i) gives you a lot of minuscule changes. A comma here, moving adverbs around there, etc. In a 10-page draft, there could be hundreds of suggestions.
(ii) only makes suggestions. I'm the one applying for the grant, so I need to explicitly approve (or reject) every single change individually. This probably won't work elegantly with `patch`.
(iii) changes individual words. Word actually records your changes as you make them. This is not the same as simply diff'ing version1 and version2. This helps me see the proofreader's point.
(iv) makes textual comments to explain changes. Or you simply need to annotate a paragraph as "I don't understand this." Maybe you need to offer different suggestions, depending on the author's meaning ("Perhaps your mean to say ...")
(v) makes different kinds of changes. "Diff" tracks changes on a line-line-basis. If you edit prose, you move around words, or lines, or even paragraphs. Basically, dealing with written language is more complicated and has more structure than source code.
(vi) does not typically have a need for a revision history. It is very rarely useful to look up when a certain sentence was introduced in a grant proposal. While it's useful to keep earlier versions as a backup (and Dropbox is enough for that), version control really is a solution looking for a problem when it comes to writing prose.
Version control is useful, though, if you want to have an proofreader work on an incomplete draft while the author is adding content.
Kinda sorta maybe.
Source control is, relatively speaking, complicated. The people who make editorial comments on text - especially in the publishing world - are often not technical folk, and asking them all to learn and understand a new tool is decidedly non-trivial.
They can all type however. I can see this being useful.
You will be amazed at the number of publishers who run their editing process of Word documents because their change control is the closest their is to a common denominator.
Trying to teach someone non-technical how to use Git, even at the simplest of levels, is very, very difficult. I tried once for a project a friend and I were working on, and eventually gave up -- the learning curve was just too high for something he probably wouldn't use ever again.
This, however, would have been almost perfect: not too complicated, easy-to-teach, and portable.
Yeah, sounds like the usecase for an easy-to-use "code review" tool. Shows and discusses differences.