modification date tracking

[Warren Young]

On Jan 20, 2006, at 9:05 PM, Edward Renaud wrote:

> just changing the selection or hoisting a section causes the prompt  
> to save changes to appear.

Naturally...the file does need to be saved at that point.

> If I respond, and later print another copy, I have a document whose  
> "last modification time" is different from my previous print-out  
> when if effect, for all practical purposes, the document has not  
> changed (from a content point of view).
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts to share on this?

The traditional meaning of "last modification time" is the time stamp  
saved for the file by the operating system.  What you're proposing  
would require that OO keep a separate time stamp, which would  
surprise many people.

I think it would be better if you maintained this time stamp separately.

The simple option is to just update it manually.  I do that on one  
document I maintain, for reasons similar to yours.

Because OO can optionally save its files as text XML files -- hit  
Cmd-4 and turn off "Compress on disk" -- you can use some version  
control systems to do this automatically.  The CVS version control  
system comes with your Mac (you may have to have Xcode installed) and  
Subversion is easily added with Fink.  (http://fink.sf.net/)

I greatly prefer Subversion.  Its creators designed it to be an  
improved replacement for CVS, and they succeeded admirably.  The only  
reason CVS is still around is inertia -- it was the standard for a  
decade before Subversion was created, so many people still rely on it  
to too great a degree to switch over to Subversion quickly.

I did a search at Versiontracker and found a dozen GUI tools for  
Subversion and CVS, if you don't wish to work in a Terminal window.

Both CVS and Subversion understand the $Date$ keyword in a file.   
When they see that text, they replace it with the check-in date when  
saving a revision.  And because they use textual difference analysis  
when checking in the file, they will ignore minor changes.  For  
instance, you could hit Ctrl-Enter to break a line, then Ctrl-Delete  
to heal it; the version control system will ignore it, because the  
textual content of the file remains the same.

The version control option is more complex, I'll admit, but it has  
serious advantages, too.  You can roll back to a previous version at  
any time, you can collaborate with multiple people on the document,  
you can pull up a change history at need....  Version control is  
wonderful!

Oh, and you might not know this, but both CVS and Subversion are both  
free as in speech and free as in beer.  Some of the GUI front-ends I  
mentioned are free, and some are not.