[...]

Agreed.

I have tried to raise this general point with RIPE repeatedly in the past with very little success. Maybe we could garner enough support for this now :)

The documents we are dealing with are almost exclusively plain text. This is the _perfect_ use case for version control systems. Not relying on one, both internally and externally, seems archaic and error-prone, to me.

Released documents would be in master, allowing anyone to clone a full copy for their convenience while _knowing_ that it is a complete and up-to-date copy. PDPs would be maintained in branches, updates to a PDP would be done by means of commits in the respective branches.

If a PDP is successful, it's merged back into master.

If not, it either lives on as a stale branch or gets moved into a special archive directory before being merged back into master.

This would:

* Keep diffs at the bare minimum in size

* Allow everyone to display changes in the way they like best

* Provide a single, canonical, up-to-date reference of all valid documents

* Allow anyone to use their favorite text handling tool to view documents and changes

* Ensure complete logging of all changes

* Introduce more accountability

* Allow statistical and other analysis

* Enable anyone to find out when a particular line last changed within seconds (think `git blame`)

* Allow proposals to be sent to RIPE by means of a patch, reducing mistakes and overhead on all sides

* Propel this process forward into the 90ies of the last century ;)

Personally, I would like to use git as the tool for this job, but any reasonably recent VCS under a FLOSS license would be better than the status quo.

I would also be glad to help RIPE implement such a system and migrate to it.

Depending on the amount of feedback this receives, it may be prudent to move this discussion somewhere else.

 

Richard