Continued from part 4: collaboration.
Version control is again not the most accessible topic yet it’s inclusion in Google Wave is significant. The version control community has seen quite a lot of upheaval in recent years. We’ve entered the new millennium with one dominant open-source version control tool: CVS.
Then Subversion emerged as a new open-source version control system that tried to address the design issues in CVS. Subversion is an easier to use version control system because it removed many arcane and idiosyncratic CVS headaches.
2005 saw a revolt in version control land with the backing by Linus Torvald of Git, an open-source distributed version control system which is radically different from both CVS and Subversion. With Git developers work on their local repositories instead of a central one as CVS and Subversion demand. Then when it becomes time to upload local changes to a bigger repository two repositories are merged instead of a local copy and a repository.
Google Wave follows the Git approach. Not many details have been revealed yet about Wave’s version control system but this is what is known. A wave is stored in associative memory and this information includes the complete version history. Hence, a wave is itself a version control repository.
Version control systems provide functionalities like forking, merging, tagging and many others. It’s not clear which features Google Wave provides although during the video members of the Wave team have hinted at elaborate version control features.
Version control is a necessity for any collaborative system, be it software development or any other form of collaboration. Google Wave offers powerful version control features. The most accessible of those features is the playback function but we can expect many more version control features. We can also expect that these features will not get in the way for those who are not inclined to use them. People will easily find their way to the playback button but it will be teams of collaborators who benefit most from Wave’s version control features.
If nothing else Google Wave is the ideal word processor where content can later be pushed into a collaborative context. Version control – present in the background – makes this transition as smooth as possible.
The next post will look at Google Wave as a social network platform.
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