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Rich version history
Rich version history
This is a place to capture links and ideas related to what I'll call "rich version history" for files stored in Nextcloud.
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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. As of version 23, Nextcloud does a great job of saving past versions of files. It's just one click to download a version or revert to it.
What is perhaps missing is a way to visualize who did what, when (and why). Change authors appear in the sidebar under "Activity", while Version list/download/revert actions appear on another tab. This makes it harder to collaborate with people on documents without also keeping in close, frequent conversation about the context of a particular document.
For example, say you notice a change to a document frequently read and maintained by several people. You click on "Versions" and see it happened last week, but there were several other changes as well. You're unable to figure out who did what so you have to start by ask the whole team. If you only knew who did what and when, their intent (the "why") would be much easier to derive.
Describe the solution you'd like
- Provide UI/UX for visualizing differences between versions of a document. This seems especially straightforward for plain text / Markdown documents. Less so for office documents, images, and other media.
- Make the "why" (author intent / why a change was made) optional or an improvement for a later time. If/when that happens it could be implemented as a "version comment" where an author could explain why they made a particular change.
- Include author name in the "Versions" tab/area.
Describe alternatives you've considered I currently use manual/offline/external tools to automate snapshotting and comparisons of files and directory trees (rsync, diff, etc.).
Additional context Related or possibly related:
- https://help.nextcloud.com/t/editing-history-view/104046
- https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/13386
- https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/9320
- https://github.com/nextcloud/android/pull/2685
- https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/4724
@szaimen cool, thank you. Maybe it does make sense to limit this to text, at least at first. That's the use case I'm personally most interested in. I'm really curious to hear if other folks care about this, and how they imagine it might work.