[pmwiki-users] Re: How to 'automatically' keep a deployed PmWiki install up to date?

[H. Fox]

On 9/26/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> Nice thread and conversation -- here are my thoughts on keeping
> things up to date.
>
> First, I'm not a big fan of anything that attempts to actually
> install updates -- there are just too many potential pitfalls and
> security problems.
>
> However, automatically identifying and notifying of new recipe
> versions sounds reasonable to me if people are willing to go
> through the effort of maintaining such a thing.  :-)
>
> An important question arises as to whether admins want to follow
> just the recipe code itself or the Cookbook pages describing the
> recipes.  For example, if I have the CompressedPages recipe
> installed, I may be interested to know when new information is
> posted to the Cookbook page even if the recipe itself doesn't
> change.
>
> Bronwyn is correct that we may be able to solve a large portion
> of this using RSS and/or trails.  And we can probably create
> some special actions on pmwiki.org to report recipe versions.
> So, we might want to investigate that further.
>
> Another possibility that solves a more generic problem is to
> come up with a watchlist and/or automatic page notification feature.
> In other words, individuals are allowed to "subscribe" to pages
> of interest (Cookbook pages in this instance) and automatically
> receive notification of some sort when the page is changed.
> (This has been discussed somewhat at http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00358,
> although I disagree strongly with many of the design/implementation
> suggestions posed there.)
>
> But lacking those, there is some merit in the idea of establishing
> a standard "version" array where recipes can store version information.
> I'm thinking something simple like:
>
>     # information for the pagestoregz recipe
>     $Module['pagestoregz'] = array(
>       'version' => 21,
>       'uri' => 'http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/CompressedPages',
>       'desc' => 'Store pages as compressed text');
>
>     # information from lightskin
>     $Module['lightskin'] = array(
>       'version' => 13002,
>       'uri' => 'http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/LightSkin',
>       'desc' => 'A lean, content-based skin');
>
> But it's not entirely clear what to do with this information once
> we have it.  It can certainly be used to tell an administrator
> what recipes are being installed on a given page (and where to
> check for updates).  Having an automatic check with pmwiki.org
> for updates requires slightly more work, plus a decision as to
> what constitutes an "update" requiring notification and how
> that should take place.
>
> Opinions welcome.

PmWiki could use that information to build a table of links.  The
table would allow an administrator to

1) See what version of each recipe is installed, and
2) Hit a link to see the page for each recipe.

For me, that would probably be enough.

Check out the "Infolister" Firefox plugin to see something similar.

   http://mozilla.doslash.org/infolister/

Hagan