[Inquiry] Re: Arisbe -> Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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EW = Elijah Wright
JA = Jon Awbrey

JA: i called it "content addressable relative memory access" (carma),
    or "graphically abstract structure" (gas), and this came up again

EW: funny :)

JA: when jack started to talk about building desktop modules
    that you would then have to keep coordinated with each
    other and with the master/mirror copies.

EW: synchronization without intervention is Really Hard, if you don't
    have a common ground from which to evaluate two things ... that
    common ground can be as simple as "which one changed last",
    but that still can't cover all possible cases where
    changes in a system happen...

EW: i dont think i'm making sense ;)

Yes, it's mind boggling.

But what you have to do is relativize the devil out of everything.
The tack I took involves a static text format on disk that is purely
abstract (no addresses at all) and a dynamic graph format in memory,
plus parsers and traversers for translating between them.  I did not
get time to write the ultimate merge routine, but it would have been,
well, routine.  The big idea was to make the merge the same thing as
a logical disjunction.  But I ran out of time to write the rest.

JA: i have been looking at my wordpad files and trying
    to think about how i might recreate something with
    this archive system that might be analogous to the
    "glossarium" that i built before at the nexist site.

EW: describe in more detail?

Will try to send some stuff tomorrow.

JA: the big catch is the lack of ability to edit stuff after you have sent it,
    and so that demands more think-ahead than i am accustomed to muster up.

EW: that's kind of a nasty thing about both email and netnews -- they're not
    particularly oriented toward version control.  mostly, people 'fake' it on
    top by settting up another layer of complexity (usually, version numbers
    of some sort).  you could probably do something like this, though it might
    be easier to come up with an interesting mail header tag that lets you
    trace changes ...  (not in the subject line -- a full X-header tag...)

JA: i can send raw source code and exe if you want to play around with it.

EW: go for it.  won't happen anytime soon, but an archival copy isn't
    a bad thing.  you could even send it to the list if you wanted ...

Okay, will look for a good way to break it up.

Jon

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