[pmwiki-users] MD5 checksums or version control (was: Re:Avoiding simultaneous edits)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 01:19:16PM -0400, Sandy wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 09:30:37PM +0100, Américo Albuquerque wrote:
> >> It would be handy if we could make a pagelist of md5. We could use it to 
> >> synchronize wiki source pages.
> > 
> > Do you need a hash for the entire page (attributes and all) or
> > just the page contents (text?).  If just the page contents, the
> > md5 could be easily saved as a page attribute.  If the entire
> > page, then the md5 takes some time to dynamically generate from 
> > each page file.
> > 
> > Or do you simply want some sort of value that is guaranteed to change
> > whenever a page is modified in any way?  That could be easily added.
> 
> As I understand it, the MD5 thing came up as a way an end user could 
> tell if his recipes were up to date; compare the hash of existing to 
> what's on the site.

I took Américo's question as being independent of the md5-for-attachments
issue; i.e., Américo was looking for a way to detect differences in
wiki pages, not the attachments.

> Would the hash and/or easily added thing change if an attached file 
> changes? I'm thinking of a cookbook author who makes a minor change, 
> updates the attached php file, but doesn't note it in the documentation.

This is hard to do, because with attachments organized on a per-group
basis, it's possible for someone to modify an attachment through a
different page than the recipe one.  And there's always the case where
the administrator directly places attachments into uploads/ without
going through PmWiki at all (as often happens on pmwiki.org, when
I'm updating one of my recipes).

Pm