GSoC Idea: Collaborative editing in Vi Editor

[Shashank Agrawal <sayhitoshashank gmail com>]

Hello,

    I am Shashank Agrawal, a Computer science student at IIIT-Hyderabad (India). I am interested in working for Gnome through GSoC this year. I want to discuss a project idea and have your feedback on it.

Project: Add collaborative editing features to the Vi editor.

This will allow people to edit and read a shared document working at different places. 

A person will be able to open a document in "shared mode" and invite people with whom he wants to share the document. The document can be read by other users while being written by one. In between, the users can use switches to indicate their willingness to write or give the writing permission to others. 

I have chalked out some of the details. Would like to discuss them here:

- The model can be either a p2p (the current author can decide whom to give permissions to) or a master-slave (master giving the permission for writing everytime) or we can even include flags for both. 

- Other options might include who actually commits/saves the data, can non-authors undo the changes, etc.

- What happens when one of the clients encounters some problems - do we keep a swap file? or do we transfer the whole file again when (and if) required.

- Can we include invitations/acceptance of files through mails or other communication channels?

- How the network speed will affect the performance?

- Minute details like deleting the text at one end, etc.


I would like to have your comments on the idea.


Cheers!

Shashank Agrawal,
IRC nick: sabotage