-## A few bits about the RCS backends
+A few bits about the RCS backends
-### Terminology
+[[toc ]]
+
+## Terminology
``web-edit'' means that a page is edited by using the web (CGI) interface
as opposed to using a editor and the RCS interface.
-### [[Subversion]]
+## [[Subversion]]
Subversion was the first RCS to be supported by ikiwiki.
-#### How does it work internally?
+### How does it work internally?
Master repository M.
You browse and web-edit the wiki on W.
-### [darcs](http://darcs.net/) (not yet included)
+## [darcs](http://darcs.net/) (not yet included)
Support for using darcs as a backend is being worked on by [Thomas
Schwinge](mailto:tschwinge@gnu.org).
-#### How will it work internally?
+### How will it work internally?
``Master'' repository R1.
What repository should [[RecentChanges]] and [[History]] work on? R1?
-##### Rationale for doing it differently than in the Subversion case
+#### Rationale for doing it differently than in the Subversion case
darcs is a distributed RCS, which means that every checkout of a
repository is equal to the repository it was checked-out from. There is
(To be continued.)
+#### Another possible approach
+
+Here's what I (tuomov) think, would be a “cleaner” approach:
+
+ 1. Upon starting to edit, Ikiwiki gets a copy of the page, and `darcs changes --context`.
+ This context _and_ the present version of the page are stored in as the “version” of the
+ page in a hidden control of the HTML.
+ Thus the HTML includes all that is needed to generate a patch wrt. to the state of the
+ repository at the time the edit was started. This is of course all that darcs needs.
+ 2. Once the user is done with editing, _Ikiwiki generates a patch bundle_ for darcs.
+ This should be easy with existing `Text::Diff` or somesuch modules, as the Web edits
+ only concern single files. The reason why the old version of the page is stored in
+ the HTML (possibly compressed) is that the diff can be generated.
+ 3. Now this patch bundle is applied with `darcs apply`, or sent by email for moderation…
+ there are many possibilities.
-### [[Git]] (not yet included)
+This approach avoids some of the problems of concurrent edits that the previous one may have,
+although there may be conflicts, which may or may not propagate to the displayed web page.
+(Unfortunately there is not an option to `darcs apply` to generate some sort of ‘confliction resolution
+bundle’.) Also, only one repository is needed, as it is never directly modified
+by Ikiwiki.
-A patch with full [Git](http://git.or.cz) support is at <http://people.debian.org/~roktas/patches/ikiwiki/git.patch>. Regarding the patch, Recai says:
+This approach might be applicable to other distributed VCSs as well, although they're not as oriented
+towards transmitting changes with standalone patch bundles (often by email) as darcs is.
+
+## [[Git]]
+
+Regarding the Git support, Recai says:
I have been testing it for the past few days and it seems satisfactory. I
haven't observed any race condition regarding the concurrent blog commits
FILE' (please see the relevant comment in mergepast for more details), so I
had to invent an ugly hack just for the purpose.
-Some other notes:
-
-- There are two separate helper packages in git.pm. To keep things self
- confined, I haven't split it up.
-
-- I've used a (mini) Debug.pm during the tests and made it a separate file
- for the convenience of others. It relies on the "constant folding"
- feature of Perl, so there shouldn't be a runtime penalty (at least this
- is what the 'perl -MO=Deparse shows', haven't made a real benchmark).
-
-- rcs_notify() has not been implemented yet (I have noticed it after I
- finished the main work).
-
-- GIT backend uses the gitweb for repository browsing (the counterpart of
- ViewCVS).
-
-- There might be some subs in GIT name space which you may prefer to move to
- the main code.
-
-- Due to the reasons explained in the code, I've written an rcs_invoke()
- wrapper. May be there should be a better approach to reach the same
- goal.
-
-- There are some parts which I may change in future, like using a global
- rcs_fatal_error and the ugly error reporting code in _rcs_commit.
+## [mercurial](http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/)
-- Documentation is missing.
+Being worked on by Emanuele Aina.
-It works for me, but of course in the end, the final decision is yours (due
-to mostly GIT quirks, the implementation is not clean as SVN). Feel free
-to fix/delete/add whatever you want. Hope it doesn't have any serious bug.
\ No newline at end of file
+<http://techn.ocracy.org/ikiwiki>