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.
Comments
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.