version compare and partial orgls

[Eric Dean Tribble <tribble>]

The religious question is whether freezing has anything to do with
      whether a Stamp is sharing-informable.  It is the obvious parallel to
      the complete operation on PartialOrgls.  I think this parallel is
      deceptive.

   The complete operation is an inform operation on informable Stamps
   (DataStamps to be specific), not Orgls.

Yes, complete is an operation on Stamps, not Orgls.  That's what I
meant.  I'll leave the informable Stamps = DataStamps issue for
another message.

...

      Freezing a Bert means
      that it can never refer to a new Stamp or Orgl.  The purpose of
      freezing is to prevent a Bert from referring to different data (so
      that accurate references can be made).  Thus links to frozen stuff
      always refer to the same contents (in the sense of equality).  The
      links and alternative versions come and go all the time, though.  I
      could create a new version of a document, with more links to the data,
      but then later delete.  As a result, information about sharing is not
      even monotonic for frozen and published Berts.

   Huh?  I don't get this.  EAddresses only use StampIDs, not BertIDs.
   Contents of works are never addressed through their BertID, because
   Berts are so non-monotonic.  What issue are you addressing.  How did
   Berts come up?

I was distinguishing Bert freezing from Stamps freezing to ferret out
the reasons why things get frozen.  This was context for asserting
that Stamps shouldn't get frozen wrt sharing-inform.

      I can imagine many situation that would require sharing-informing a
      frozen Bert.  Imagine all the people that freeze the Berts for their
      man pages, or Hamlet, and now want to merge the two identical
      documents.  Or imagine documents that quote documents not yet online.
      People would just enter the material and publish, and add the sharing
      information when the quoted document gets put online.

      The only way I can think of to implement the examples above is to
      share-inform frozen Berts.  

   How did informing Berts come up?  Berts can't be informed (last I
   looked).  What are we talking about?

Sorry, I meant the only implementation was to directly or indirectly
inform a Stamp under a frozen Bert.

   It is going to be interesting to try to come up with understandable
   explanations of this stuff.  I'm even more glad that first product
   only reveals Docs&Links.

I'm actually pretty hopeful about good descriptions.  We won't have to
describe why we chose a particular set of semantics.  The better all
the pieces work together and the fewer distinctions there are, the
easier the explanation will be.  This is one of the reasons I want to
reduce or eliminate the distinctions between DataThingies and
nonDataThingies.  (Boy do I like that term! :-)

dean