[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Re: Organization of pages (was: Hierarchical groups)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 10:01:39PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
>   
> > The question (I think) you are really asking is why not give pages
> > a unique ID other than the page name,
> 
> No, I mean in *addition* to their page name. It should be as simple as 
> adding a field: "ID=2323" where the number is increased each time a new 
> page is created.

I have no problem with adding a new field of this sort to the existing
page files.  But I don't quite see what value this brings, or how 
this makes it easier to do any of the things I think you're talking
about doing (you'll have to walk me through this, I'm afraid).

When I think of having unique page IDs in the sense of a serial number,
like this case, I tend to think that the serial number would
become the name of the file that is used to store/locate the page and 
that there has to be a separate PageName->ID mapping maintained somewhere.

> I just realized that with an extension, version control of page names
> would let you deal with renamed pages (that don't have a redirect).
> Would that be useful?

Not really; the existing redirect mechanism does pretty much what I want
it to do--it lets references to the old location correctly point to
the new location and notifies people of the change.

> > Using IDs other than pagenames throws out a lot of tools (ftp, rm, mv,
> > del, cp, etc.) that are now available for administrative purposes, or at
> > the least makes them more difficult to use.
> 
> * 'rm' will still work (the pages i definitely gone though)
> * 'mv' will still work (the page has been renamed though)
> * 'cp' would need extra work aftwards (*)

I'm missing some pieces here.  If "ID" is just a field
in the page's file (and the page's name is still the filename), then
yes, these commands still work.  But in this case I don't see what
value the "ID" field brings us or how it would be used/useful.  
OTOH, if the "ID" is used as the page's filename, then an 
administrator can't do something simple like "rm Main.*" to get 
rid of all of the pages in Main.

Pm