[Design] Re: [Please review] Updates to Stamping, aka Edit/Update Spec

[Philippe Bossut]

Hi,

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> By the way, I'm not saying we should abandon the idea of edit/update 
> for non-calendar items, just that it seems like it should be a 
> different process from the normal sending of an email.  I think that 
> the idea of attaching a document (or any other item) to a message 
> should be distinct from the idea of having a conversation with someone 
> *about* a document (or other item). 

I agree with you but I've the strange feeling that we already had that 
discussion at the beginning of the 0.7 cycle (almost a year ago). That 
was the difference between "chatter" about something and "edit" of 
something. At the time, I think we identified that we would need 
threads/clusters and history browsing to solve that correctly but that, 
in the meantime, we'll live with the confusion of having the note field 
being unique and used for all of those.

I agree that it is confusing and not the final say on the problem and I 
recall Mimi agreed on that as well. Remember though that at the time we 
tried to limit the amount of email functionalities we had to implement 
so that we could get to a workable schedule. Dropping thread/clustering 
is one cut we had to make.

Personally, I finally came to term with the issue by considering that, 
for Preview at least, the Edit/Update workflow is simulating an old 
fashion bulletin board workflow where an item is being edited by a 
multiplicity of authors without a visible history of edits... A 
limitation for sure but also a quite powerful concept that avoids the 
handling of long threads when editing one simple item.

For Preview, we'll certainly have to relnote and screen cast carefully 
the difference between "Updating" an item and "Replying" to an item...

Cheers,
- Philippe