[pmwiki-users] Hiearchical Groups Proposal.

Joachim Durchholz jo at durchholz.org
Wed Oct 18 09:24:05 CDT 2006


Américo Albuquerque schrieb:
> Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>> Ideally, metadata would be pages, possibly with a special marker in 
>> the page name so PmWiki knows that they don't get meta-metadata.
>>
> If metadata would be pages they could also have its own metadata. They 
> wouldn't have metadata related to pages (like GroupAttributes, 
> GroupHeader and/or GroupFooter)

You snipped the part where I explicitly wrote that metadata pages would 
have to be marked so that they don't get metadata themselves.

>> Downside is that if that's done to the final consequence and page 
>> attributes (passwords) become separate pages, too, then PmWiki would 
>> have to open an additional file to check view permissions. It would 
>> also have to do a directory search since the metadata may be stored 
>> several levels up the hierarchy.
>> The wiki would have to have thousands of pages to make this a worry, 
>> of course. *And* it would have to live in a file system that does 
>> linear directory searches (i.e. it would have to be ext2fs, or ext3fs 
>> with no -O dir_index.)
>>
> That would be bad, really bad. It would make pmwiki work just on linux. 
> This mean that Windows and mac users would have to use older versions or 
> change to other wiki engine

It's just the other way round: NTFS and HFS+ used indexed directories (I 
just checked), so we have a non-issue on reasonably modern Windows and 
Mac OS machines.

I could imagine that old Linux installations with an outdated file 
system might have problems here.
That's nothing that a backup - reformat - restore cycle couldn't fix, 
though Linux administrators will usually loathe to have to do that. 
Converting ext2 to ext3 with a dir_index option is even a low-risk 
operation that can be reverted, and that may be possible with as little 
work as dropping to a boot disk or rescue-system, adding a few options, 
and rebooting the machine. (And if things don't work, there's always the 
option to go back to ext2, so this is a low-risk operation.)

Regards,
Jo




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list