--- David Brown <opencm@davidb.org> wrote:
> Other file formats cause the issue to become
> significantly more
> complicated. Take MS-word for example. Word itself
> will gladly show
> you document differences between two documents where
> small changes have
> been made to the contents of text. But what if one
> document has had
> significant formatting changes (change the paragraph
> style). How would
> you do a merge if one branch changed the formatting,
> and the other
> branch changed the text, or maybe a different aspect
> of the formatting.
This would really depend on how the info is stored.
It sounds like there's a viable algorithm for
tree-based representations so if Word stored it's data
in trees (isn't MS moving towards XML
representations?), one would exist for Word. Doesn't
ClearCase have a diffing algorithm for Word and other
MS docs.
> CAD drawings are even more difficult. It may not be
> difficult to
> determine what has changed, but how do you represent
> that change. A
> diff tool is plausible (show both drawings, in
> different colors, for
> example), but a merge is even more difficult.
I partially agree. The real question is, "What does
'merge' mean for images?"
Technically, if a diffing algorithm exists, a merge
algorithm can also exist (eg do something similar to
diff3). The difficulty is whether the merge algorithm
conforms to the human interpretation of merging for
the particular item.
MTC,
Noel
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Received on Thu Aug 15 17:34:52 2002