As a lyx user I am forever thankful (and forever expecting more) for the 
work of lyx developers.
I read on the internet that  lyx 1.4 supports change tracking.

I will be glad to use this feature once lyx 1.4 is released but I 
already want more.

I am developing a parser generator tool and when I release it the
documentation will be in Lyx.

I would like for users who find errors in the documentation to be able 
to send me files pointingout these errors.  
Change tracking will allow a way of doing this.  
Users will simply send me a copy
of the documentation  containing the proposed changes that they added 
using the change tracking facility.

But a number of problems immediately come to mind.

1)  I don't want users to send me a complete file 
    (say the size of the lyx user's guide)
    just to point out a few minor mistakes. 
    They could instead send me a diff file
    of the two verions of the documentations and I could then 
    reconstruct their verion of
    the documenttion from from my copy of the original lyx document
    and the diff file.

    This all sounds quite complicated. 
    Ideally lyx could have a command  "createLyxDiff"
    which creates this diff file (say doc.lyx.diff) or (preferably)
    some other file containing the necessary information.
    The user then sends me a file doc.lyx.diff. I then run lyx
    on my copy of the docuumentation and from lyx run the command  
    "installDiffFile:  doc.lyx.diff"
    which morphs my copy of the documention to the users version 
    containing his/her comments.
    I then run the change tracking facility features to update 
    the documentation.
    I think that this would be nice feature but it has problems of 
    its own.

2)    If the above feature is implemented then there is a problem.  
      If two users send me change files to
      update my documentation then once I update documentation 
      based on one of the files, the other file will not match 
      correctly with the updated version of the document since 
      it was created based on the older original version of 
      the documentation.  
      Thus the  "installDiffFile:"  command needs
      to be able to load multiple (possibly a large number) of  
      doc.lyx.diff.num  files at one time and
      the change tracking facility of  lyx needs to support processing 
      them all at one time.

      With this feature when the document is released 
      it would have embedded in it a date stamp.
      Once that date is reached copies of the document would not 
      allow change tracking to be used (with some kind of 
      override facility of course).  
      Also, once that date is reached I would run
      lyx on the document and all the doc.lyx.diff.num files I have 
      received and update the documentation accordingly.  
      I would then release the new version of the 
      documentation with a new embedded date stamp.

      Note that this implies many documentation releases, 
      much more often then say the sofware. 
      I believe this mechanism will result in much more rapid 
      development of user documentation.
      It should result in documentation that is very clean in terms 
      of typos (but of course doesn't guaranttee quality documention).
      Since the documentation for Lyx is in Lyx, the first
      benifitiary of this feature could be Lyx itself.

Comments welcome.

Ralph Boland