On 28 Oct 2010, at 11:15, Scot Becker wrote:

> Jambunathan,
> 
> (2) could be useful but a bit far-fetched at the
> moment.
>  
> Really?  Lots of us track changes with git, sometimes by means of one of the Emacs interfaces for it like Magit.  You may be thinking of some interface-level features which aren't available by this method, like the ability to annotate changes in the same place you make them, I suppose.  But working this way has a lot of 'features' that "track changes" doesn't.

We once thought of having some markup in our LaTeX files to track changes, offering annotations. If I recall correctly, we had a command \changed{old}{new}{comment}.
You could leave out the new or old text part: newly added  text would be \changed{}{bla bla}{this is new text!}, deleted text would be \changed{completely wrong}{}{what an idiot}. The command would render the old/new text differently (gray, strikethrough, blue, whatever) and add the comment as a margin note.

Maybe something like this would be useful/feasible in Org? (not that I have a need for this -- we never implemented that command, either).

Cheers,
Peter.