Save As

_v2, then _JOHN_EDITS, then _MARISOL_MERGED.

Nobody would call this branching. It’s branching.

What a real branch gives you

  • a record of where it diverged
  • an identity distinct from the filename
  • a mechanical diff against its origin
  • a merge operation that mostly works automatically

None of this comes from typing _v2.

The substitutes

The divergence point: whatever someone remembers.

The diff: reading both documents side by side.

The merge: retyping one person’s changes into the other’s file.

Three of the four substitutes are memory. Memory is not shared storage.

The graph is legible

A Save As chain drawn as a branch-and-merge graph: essay_draft.docx to essay_draft_v2.docx, branching to John's edits, the two lines rejoining at a merged file.

You can reconstruct this from the folder listing alone.

What it can’t tell you

Whether it’s true.

MARISOL_MERGED records that a merge was claimed. Not that one was performed, and not from which copy.

Merge conflict, as a lived experience, predates the term: discovered only when someone compares the files by eye and finds they disagree.

Next week

None of this is new. People managed divergent copies for centuries before any of it ran on a computer.

What did they actually do?

Sources

  • RCS — A System for Version Control Walter F. Tichy, Software: Practice and Experience 15(7), 1985, 637–654. Organises revisions into an ancestral tree rooted at the initial revision: the same structure the filename chain implies, recorded by the system that performed the operations rather than by the people who did. wiley · free PDF