[pmwiki-users] Subversion PageStore

Kathryn Andersen kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org
Fri Nov 9 17:18:43 CST 2007


On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 06:31:10PM +0000, Ian Barton wrote:
> 
> > A while back, a few people expressed mild interest in using Subversion
> > as a backend for a PmWiki PageStore (that is, using subversion for the
> > storage of wiki pages).  Did anything ever come of this?  I'm getting
> > interested in this; or adapting something like this to be used with
> > svk(1).
> > 
> > [1] SVK is a distributed version-control system which uses Subversion as
> > a back-end.  http://svk.elixus.org/
> 
> Out of curiosity why would you want to do this? PmWiki already gives you 
> version history.

A bare-essentials version history, yes.  Sufficient for most things, but
frustrating if one wants to be able to do more.
 
> If you are interested in distributed version control, you might want to 
> give bazaar (aka bzr) a look. See http://bazaar-vcs.org/

Even if I were interested in bazaar rather than svk (I like svk), for
some of the wikis I manage -- the ones at work -- using bazaar is out of
the question.  We've only just recently changed over from CVS to
Subversion for our revision control, and I wouldn't be allowed to
introduce yet another revision control system.

For my work wikis, the wiki code and configuration are already checked
in to subversion: the way the websites are managed at work, I do all
changes on a development machine, test them, and then commit them.  Then
on the "production" machine (whether this is an internal website or an
external one) I deploy the changes by doing a subversion update.
 
But the wiki pages themselves are not part of this system.  That has a
number of drawbacks:
- they're only backed up by the general "back up this machine" setup
- mirroring wiki pages on a development wiki can only go one way; it's
  easy enough to copy the wiki pages from the production machine to the
  development machine (just use rsync or something like that), but any
  page editing that goes the other way needs to be done by hand, so as not
  to overwrite changes that someone else may have made.
- For plugins that require one to update wiki pages as part of their
  installation configuration, rolling out an update is not an
  atomic change.  This is Not Good.
- things would generally be much neater if all the wiki stuff for those
  wikis was under subversion, rather than just some of it.

I would really like to have this feature; it would solve some definite
problems, and would have the potential to solve others.

Kathryn Andersen
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