[pmwiki-users] extra guidelines for recipe publishing

[H. Fox]

On 4/10/07, Hans <design5 at softflow.co.uk> wrote:
> Tuesday, April 10, 2007, 8:34:24 AM, H. wrote:
>
> > I believe when I wrote that proposal and created the accompanying
> > "recipe jumpstart" archives (some time ago) I changed from a "just
> > unpack" procedure to the "unpack, then copy" one for several reasons.
> > Here are a few:
>
> > 1) It's a bit scary to encourage people to unzip a directory tree of
> > files directly into the PmWiki root, don't you think?
>
> Scary or not, it is a reasonable method, especially if files are
> unpacked into the recipe's own subfolders.

The administrator wouldn't necessarily know that until the archive is unpacked.

One way greatly mitigates the possibility of accidental overwrites,
the other doesn't.

Personally I wouldn't unpack anything into the root of my PmWiki
installation anyway... at the very least not without unpacking it in a
temporary directory first.

> > 2) It permits easy comparison of old and new versions of a recipe.
>
> Yes. But you end up having perhaps lots of old unpacked versions
> sitting somewhere. I just deleted 20 or more unpacked pmwiki versions!

That's a drawback, but a small one I think.  Like you say it's similar
to how PmWiki versioning works, which can be considered a feature.
:-)

> > 3) It makes reverting to a previous version of a recipe easier, should
> > the need (suddenly) arise.
>
> One could go back to an older compressed archive file and unpack it
> again.

Assuming the older compressed archive is still around. :-)

> Still, your suggestion is a pretty safe method.
>
> But speaking as recipe author I trying it first time I found it was a lot
> of extra work to get a packed recipe version ready for upload.
> Basically I have to keep the files for the upload release version
> synchronised with my actual installed recipe files. Maybe I will get
> used to it, but it doubles the work and ther eare possibilities of
> errors due to forgetting synchronising some part of the recipe.

That's probably the hardest part and I agree it requires some effort
on the part of the author.  Perhaps one way to make it easier would be
to use symlinks (shortcuts) as the installed recipe files (server
configuration permitting).  Maybe not, since the directory name would
be changing and that might break the symlinks.

My "Proposal for a Simpler Approach" was inspired by some discussion
at the time that seemed to be veering toward set of guidelines that I
thought would make maintenance difficult.  I'd certainly welcome
seeing an even simpler approach than mine.

Hagan