A friend emailed me saying:

I made a couple of small changes and saved the version. Then I did a save as to put the document where I store docs and it lost all the version information. Anyway, thanks for the edit. I am posting this up today and sending out to my news letter list.

I replied:

You didn't save it, you did a "save as." And, that's a completely new document. If you had copied it from place 1 to place 2, you'd have preserved your history. But, you told OO to save the document as a brand new document when you clicked "save as." Wouldn't you hate to have to go clean out the history manually if you didn't want to share those versions with a third party? That's not a bug, it's a feature, and one I understand and appreciate.

It may aught to ping you and say "Hey, you're going to lose your history if you save it this way." But, a trend in the Unix/Posix world is to read the docs and tell the product to shut up and leave us alone. Maybe it should have offered a button popup that said "Save with/without version history." But, I would find that incredibly annoying. Most Unix folks think the same way. Most of us would say "If you wanted to move the file, why didn't you just move the file? OO isn't a file manager, it's an editor." And, that's just how we work in the Unix world - you've been windozed!

I can't stand Microsoft's constant attempts to help me out - like disconnecting a USB device when I've ONLY GOT ONE! When I click on disconnect, why ask me if I'm sure and which device I'd like to disconnect. Just disconnect the thing. I'm aware that if it's in use it'll cause me troubles.

Posted in tech jasonn's blog