When the owner of a document is in the proces of merging variants, he still should be able to make modifications to the variants. The diff-view shall show the owners' changes alongside with the changes of the author of the variant.
Guest
This implies that a new variant is not created and does not go through the usual approval process?
This should probably be a function which can be disabled, depending on committee (or deliverable type?). I don't think this behaviour would be permitted in the 3GPP process - not even for Secretariat.