Hi all,

I recently had to work closely with someone with our galaxy server, sharing histories back-and-forth with them. Each time they would run couple of jobs and share the history with me, and I'll check their results, perhaps run couple of jobs of my own and re-share the new results with them.

The problem is that collaborating like that is quite annoying. Besides the need to go through so many clicks (of publish/share and list-histories-shared-with-me/clone/switch), another problem is that my histories list looks like this:

=== Clone of 'Clone of 'Clone of 'XXXX, BLAT' shared by 'gordon@cshl.edu' (active items only)' shared by 'xxxxxx@cshl.edu' (active items only)' shared by 'gordon@cshl.edu' (active items only) === Clone of 'Clone of 'xxxxxx, BLAT' shared by 'gordon@cshl.edu' (active items only)' shared by 'xxxxxxx@cshl.edu' (active items only) === Clone of 'xxxxxx, BLAT' shared by 'gordon@cshl.edu' (active items only) === and so on...

each history adds just one or two more useful datasets, and it becomes cumbersome to manage all of them (not to mention that my histories-list and shared-histories-list are littered with the same history over and over).

I think that in order to take galaxy to the 'next-level' of collaborative frame-work, a truly shared history mechanism will be useful: A single history instance, that once shared, every change made to it (by any user) will immediately appear on all users sharing this history.

conceptually similar to http://piratepad.net/ (previously Etherpad), where all participants immediately see all the changes made to the content.

Thanks, -gordon