Re: User representation of orgls & berts

[Greg Lutz <acad!alce!greg>]

I think that I, a relative Xanadu-innocent, thoroughly agree with Dean
in the question of what should end up in the historical trace after a
sequence of saves, reverts, and unreverts:  if I understand correctly,
his proposal is that each one of these operations would put a new node
in the sequence; the node created by a revert or unrevert operation
would always be a copy of an earlier node.  It looks like what Ravi is
trying to do is compress "uninteresting" intermediate states out of the
trace, e.g., when you've done a dozen edit/saves and want to revert
back to the third one, it might not seem to make much sense to enter
nodes for each of the individual reversion steps into the trace.  But
in fact, I think it does.  The way to accomplish what Ravi wants is an
atomic multi-step reversion operation, which in my career I've seen
provided by just one editor/file system, that of the Univac 1100
series.