[pmwiki-users] Burnt! Simultaneous edit lost :-(

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I've just released pmwiki-2.1.beta34, which no longer loses authors'
edits whenever a simultaneous edit merge fails.

Now, when an author saves a page, PmWiki checks to see if the page
changed while the author was editing the page.  If yes, then it
attempts to perform a merge (as it did in previous versions).
If it's unable to perform a merge, the author is returned to the
edit form with a message:

    The page you are editing has been modified since you started 
    editing it.  If you continue, your changes will overwrite any 
    changes that others have made.  (View changes)

The "View changes" links opens up the page history in another window
so the author can see what recently changed.  (In an upcoming version
of PmWiki, this page will display only those changes that occured
since the author began editing, instead of displaying the entire
page history.)

On a related and equally important note, I've made a cookbook page
at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SimultaneousEdits that contains
a script that can be used by those systems (e.g., Windows) that do
not have a diff3 utility available.  Installation of this script
is considerably easier than the "SimuleditWithoutPopen" page that
has been offerred in the past.

Some will reasonably ask why I'm not just using the new script in the 
distribution; to be honest, I want to test it a little more first, 
and secondly it relies on some third-party libraries that are, well, 
huge and have a big memory footprint when they run.  (The source 
code for the libraries that perform the merge is over 1100 lines; 
contrast this with the entire source of PmWiki which is less than 
6000 lines of code.)  I may decide to use this library anyway, but
I still want to investigate the possibility of having a more
concise version for the distribution.

Testing and feedback encouraged.

Pm