[Arm-netbook] revision control in the arts?

[Hendrik Boom]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 05:47:35PM -0400, John Luke Gibson wrote:
> Alrightie~!
> 
> Foremost, since "existing" free software and cultural works aren't
> likely to be sold, I think a libre software standards organization
> wouldn't certify individual works or pieces of code, so much as
> projects as a whole including roles performed by non-developers
> 
> Version control is almost ubiquitously used for source code, to the
> point it should hardly need mentioned; however very rarely are
> non-source project files, such as .blend files, collaboratively
> designed this way. I don't think people are unwilling to use version
> control in this way, rather they just don't think of it since most
> artists aren't developers and art has been digitally designed for much
> longer than version control systems have been easy to use. So I think
> uploading files to repository and saving changes as commits, would be
> a good 'non-developer' "best practice" to apply to a software
> certification standard.

A lot of file formats, especially those used by artists, are hostile 
to the essential 'merge' operation in version control.

Even the current real standards for word processors (such as odt) are 
bad for this.

They use compression, which has an effect like cryptographic hashing 
on ones efforts to distinguish change from background.

Even the uncompressed .odf word processor format has this problem, 
being based on xml.  If a merge operation sees enough similarity it 
guesses what the actual changes are.  If it guesses wrong the merged 
file may have its bracket structure severely damaged, requirg manual 
repair.  But users do not interact with their documents at the XML 
level, so they are completely lost.

Why this isn't a problem with C is that programmers do interact with 
their code in a textual level, so they ar very familiar with the 
editing of brackets.

For word processing, I think the only good solution is a document 
compiler, with the writer editing the source code.

I know of nothing comparable for visual arts.

-- hendrik