I agree with this proposal. That being said... On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Tore Anderson < tore.anderson@redpill-linpro.com> wrote:
As a general feedback to the draft document page, not specific to 2012-03, I find it preferable if the «original text» and «new text» boxes are made as small as absolutely possible.
[...] Agreed. I have tried to raise this general point with RIPE repeatedly in the past with very little success. Maybe we could garner enough support for this now :) The documents we are dealing with are almost exclusively plain text. This is the _perfect_ use case for version control systems. Not relying on one, both internally and externally, seems archaic and error-prone, to me. Released documents would be in master, allowing anyone to clone a full copy for their convenience while _knowing_ that it is a complete and up-to-date copy. PDPs would be maintained in branches, updates to a PDP would be done by means of commits in the respective branches. If a PDP is successful, it's merged back into master. If not, it either lives on as a stale branch or gets moved into a special archive directory before being merged back into master. This would: * Keep diffs at the bare minimum in size * Allow everyone to display changes in the way they like best * Provide a single, canonical, up-to-date reference of all valid documents * Allow anyone to use their favorite text handling tool to view documents and changes * Ensure complete logging of all changes * Introduce more accountability * Allow statistical and other analysis * Enable anyone to find out when a particular line last changed within seconds (think `git blame`) * Allow proposals to be sent to RIPE by means of a patch, reducing mistakes and overhead on all sides * Propel this process forward into the 90ies of the last century ;) Personally, I would like to use git as the tool for this job, but any reasonably recent VCS under a FLOSS license would be better than the status quo. I would also be glad to help RIPE implement such a system and migrate to it. Depending on the amount of feedback this receives, it may be prudent to move this discussion somewhere else. Richard