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Is that unique to software though? Plenty of people can follow a plan but still find it tough to start from first principles, I would think.

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SkiFire13 2 days ago | parent [-]

I've worked for a bit in an engineering company and I was surprised at how bad they were at versioning their documents.

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codazoda 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do you have any examples of correctly versioned documents?

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SkiFire13 a day ago | parent | next [-]

Some big issues were:

- they were manually tracking the "versions" of documents by copy-pasting them in some folders - and even this was only done for each "release" of each document; inbetween two releases all the changes were made to files shared on Onedrive (possibly concurrently by two people, sometimes leading to conflicts with the loss of days of work) - at every release the changes since the last release had to be looked up manually every time and included in a document; this was very time consuming. - informations were duplicated in multiple documents, with no way to relate them; every change to one of them had to be manually replicated to the others.

I would argue that a correctly versioned document should not have these issue. A dedicated software should track all the changes, including individual ones inbetween releases. It should also provide a way to list them, possibly relative to some milestore (like the last release). Data should be kept in a format that's easy to automatically compare for changes, and hopefully in a deduplicated way so that changes need to be made only in one place. If that's not possible I would argue there should be a software that checks for inconsistent informations and prompts for them to be synchronized.

In the software development world this has mostly been solved by version control systems like git and continuous integration to ensure that the codebase is in a consistent state after every change.

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josephg 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, I’d say a markdown / latex / typst document in a Git repository would fit the bill.

I’m working on a history project at the moment which has reconstructed the version history of the US constitution based on the secretarial records and various commentaries written during the drafting process. At the moment we’re working on some US state constitutions, the Indian constitution, Irish peace process and the Australian constitutional process. We only have so many historical records of the committee processes, but it turns out to be more than enough to reconstruct the version history of the text.

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andai 2 days ago | parent [-]

Fascinating, what tools are you using to keep track of all that? (Also, are there any interesting practices involved here?)

	▲	josephg a day ago \| parent [-]
		All custom tooling. I should write it up at some point - there's an awful lot to say about the whole thing, both technically and historically. And the data shows that there are several things apparently taught in American schools (like the idea that the final text is a compromise between the Virginia plan and New Jersey plan) that are simply wrong.