[Pmwiki-users] A rough idea--need feedback/input

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at sci.tamucc.edu
Fri Jan 10 15:10:43 CST 2003


On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, niall b durham wrote:

> It would be nice to easily see what has changed on the Wiki page (in
> the "browse" presentation) since a particular date.  [...]

Just a quick+brief response.  Several people have talked to me about
the utility of having a "display document with changes since time X"
feature, and the hard part is rendering the output itself from
the diffs.  Oh, it's probably easy if one knows the correct diff(1) or
patch(1) incantation, but I don't know it.  Essentially to render the
output I'd need to have a complete version of the text document
with some sort of markup (e.g., generated by patch(1) or diff(1)) that
PmWiki could use to determine what has been added and what has been
deleted.

I don't think diff(1)/patch(1) work well for this purpose, but again
I'm not totally familiar with them.  For example, given two versions of 
a document:

    The quick fox jumped over the lazy dog.  (old)
    The quick brown fox jumped over the dog. (new)

diff(1)/patch(1) would generate something like:

    1a
    <<< The quick fox jumped over the lazy dog.
    >>> The quick brown fox jumped over the dog.

and it's not entirely clear how "smart" PmWiki would need to be in order
to produce the correct rendering.  It could possibly render this as
(in Niall's XHTML):

    <del>The quick fox jumped over the lazy dog.</del>
    <ins>The quick brown fox jumped over the dog.</ins>

but I suspect what the user would really prefer to see is

    The quick <ins>brown</ins> fox jumped over the <del>lazy</del> dog.

which means that PmWiki has to become smart enough to do its own diffs.

I need to look much further into the diff/patch options and related
utilities.   Or am I missing an obvious simplification?

Pm






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