[pmwiki-users] Proposal: version control for cookbooks recipes

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Oct 24 17:01:45 CDT 2006


On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 07:23:50PM +0200, Stefan Schimanski wrote:
> Updating cookbook
> recipes for new features, but much more important for security fixes is
> very complicated at the moment. Especially if you have modified recipes
> to your needs it makes a lot of work.  Moreover you have to go through
> all the PmWiki.org pages to look for updates once in a while (or use the
> notify feature, then at least you are notified automatically)

I've been formulating a scheme whereby one could use pmwiki.org's
Site.Analyzer tool (or something like it) to quickly determine
which recipes on a site are out of date.

> As an example I just saw the update of the commentboxplus script of HansB by
> accident. It took me quite some time to identify and apply his
> (security-) fixes to my modified version, which even worse was based on
> the commentboxplus2 version, juggling with patch, diff and wget.
> 
> I wonder if it would make sense to create some open repository (maybe on
> sourceforge, if possible?) using Subversion. Then updating is a matter
> of "svn update".  How is the common opinion about something like that? Of
> course one could still download them directly (with a direct http link
> to the latest version in the repository) for those who don't like using
> svn.
> 
> Opinions?

Unfortunately, for many cookbook recipe authors the svn requirement
might be a non-starter.  So, that means that updating recipes will often
be inconsistent, with some recipes coming from svn and others requiring
a separate download step.  (And I really don't want to make svn checkins
or sourceforge registration into a requirement for contributing
recipes.)

With sourceforge there's also a licensing issue, in that any recipes
hosted there would have to be provided under a license acceptable
to sourceforge.  And it might also be the case that if recipes are
in a common repository then they'd have to have identical licenses,
which might also be an obstacle.

Still, there's already a SourceForge project for PmWiki on sourceforge,
and of course I have a separate svn repository for the PmWiki code
itself.  If there are any recipe authors that would like to be maintaining
recipes through subversion instead of the Attach: feature, I think
we may be able to set something up for that.

Pm




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list