Auto branching for help with documents?

owen_sparks

Hi folks.
@billy2 made a great point in a separate topic, so I wanted to pull it out into its own thread. (Hope you don't mind?)

billy2 said:

And another thing, please version your document before sharing, then give me edit rights to your document. You can always get back to the original version and branch to continue. When you share with read only rights I have to make a copy to see what's going on. I promise I'll branch using my name before making any changes to your design and hopefully others will branch before changing with their ideas. In the end we can have a document with Ben's ideas, my ideas and anyone else who wants to contribute. Right now copying documents is the old fashion way and nothing accumulates. Instead we just end up with a bunch of documents with no continuity.

One of the core principles of OnS is the ability to collaborate across the globe pretty much seamlessly.  Yet with asking for (or giving) help on the forum we're mostly taking private copies of documents and then taking screen-grabs or posting links to the copies.  Short of making local copies and sending them via email we seem to be doing everything to go back in time.

The branch in the actual document seems like a much cleaner approach, but I'd like to take away the manual nature of building all this, both for the giver or receiver of the help.

I'd love to see the process being automatic.  We already log into the forum, so if we click on a link to a doc. then it'd be great if the link created a branch in the target doc, and named it with the user's details.  It might be good if only the branch had any sort of write/copy access.

Thoughts?

Owen S.

lougallo

You can delete a workspace.. which sort of deletes a "branch" as long as there are no version in that branch.  Automatic anything like this can be a little scary but what if you could pull a copy, show your help then if you like it merge only those changes into your doc?  More of the GIT model?  Seems the better option for help but more importantly public docs that you want to do community contributions to.

owen_sparks

Likewise there could be a button in Ons to request help, that automatically creates a thread on the forum with a link to the active document.

konstantin_shiriazdanov

Without ability to delete unnessecery branches of design it can cause a mess in the version tree. Might be useful to have the opportunity to share only a certain branch.

lougallo

You can delete a workspace.. which sort of deletes a "branch" as long as there are no version in that branch.  Automatic anything like this can be a little scary but what if you could pull a copy, show your help then if you like it merge only those changes into your doc?  More of the GIT model?  Seems the better option for help but more importantly public docs that you want to do community contributions to.