On 6/18/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Patrick R. Michaud</b> <<a href="mailto:pmichaud@pobox.com">pmichaud@pobox.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 08:13:17PM +0100, Hans wrote:<br>> Monday, June 18, 2007, 5:55:04 PM, Sandy wrote:<br>> >> I'm guessing there are changes in the attributes, particularly the<br>> >> lastmodified field, and maybe author.
<br>><br>> Okay I tested this:<br>> Opened a page, clicked once inside the text area,<br>> clicked Save. No actual page content change.<br>> Now this is recorded as entry in RecentChanges<br>> and in the page history with an empty entry.
<br>> What changed is the LastModified time stamp and<br>> LastModifiedBy author name, even though no modification has happened.<br>><br>> It would be nice if this behaviour could be suppressed.<br><br>PmWiki used to work exactly this way --
i.e., a post operation that<br>didn't change the text would be ignored, such that there would be no<br>entry in the page history or RecentChanges.<br><br>However, when we introduced pagelist indexes, it became important
<br>that saving a page would also regenerate its attributes<br>(such as the targets= attribute) and any associated indexes,<br>as well as perhaps record who was reponsible for doing that.<br>So, we no longer wanted to ignore such posts.
<br><br>There were other complications that arose from ignoring<br>"identical text" posts, which would often require explanation on<br>the mailing list, along with suggestions to "add blank lines<br>to the end of a page to get it to really save". It hasn't happened
<br>in such a long time that I've now forgotten exactly what the<br>complications were, but I remember they were part of the reason<br>for switching.<br><br>So, I don't think we can turn off same-text posts entirely.
<br>What we could potentially do, however, is change the code so<br>that the page is still saved and attributes are generated,<br>but no RecentChanges entry is made and an entry isn't<br>made in the page history.<br><br>
This does have the potential to introduce some confusion,<br>because in such a case the $LastModifiedBy author might not<br>be the same as the last author listed in the page history.<br>Similarly, someone looking at the page history might note
<br>that the page's last modification time doesn't match the<br>last entry in the page history (although this occurs already,<br>e.g., when someone sets a password on a page).<br><br>Another possibility would be to allow the page history to
<br>record the empty entry in the page file, but not display<br>empty page histories when ?action=diff is invoked.<br>That keeps the record in pagehistory a bit more intact,<br>without being annoying to others.<br><br>Personally, I think that if we just suppressed the
<br>updating of RecentChanges on same-text edits, then<br>everything would probably work out okay. But I'm open for<br>opinions here.</blockquote><div><br>What about suppressing a NotifyList-generated message, or an RSS sorted by most-recent? Which options would allow for those, and/or are there issues with them?
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