| Description | The 3-way merge method seems to be the go-to method for multiple people to work in parallel on a map.
Based on practical experiences, this method seems to be quite reliant on methodical backing up by 1 of the mappers (the one who carries out the merges). This is an example procedure with a versioning system like SVN:
"
- rev 3061 is committed. Amadeus makes a backup of this rev.
- Bikerdude and Amadeus both work on rev 3061
- Bikerdude commits his work first, rev is now 3062
- Amadeus backs up his work, reverts his local map version, downloads rev 3062, then merges:
1) backup of rev 3061 (original version)
2) rev 3062 (Biker's work)
3) backup of Amadeus' work
and commits (rev 3063). Rinse and repeat.
"
So Amadeus needs to manually make a backup 1) of rev 3061 before they both start working on it and 2) of his own work before he obtains Bikerdude's version of the map (to avoid overwrites).
Since in a map collaboration the "original version" of the map is usually the result of the previous 3-way merge, I think the process could be simplified and less error-prone if 3-way merges automatically produced a backup of the merge result. Probably only 1 such backup is needed at a time, since this would otherwise overlap too much with DR's other backup methods, wasting space. It could maybe be next to the merged map as a .map.3way, or in a subfolder like maps/merges/...
Maybe this backup could even automatically be entered into the 1st map slot the next time the 3-way merge interface is opened, so that Amadeus only needs to plug in his own and Bikerdude's version of the map. This should probably be user-specific and not map-specific, since only the mapper who performed the merge will have this backup.
Will still need to think more on what could be done about eliminating the 2nd manual backup, before Amadeus receives the work of his co-mapper. Could be that this is an SVN-specific problem. |
|---|
