[pmwiki-users] RFC: Drafts history bug

[Chuck Goldstein]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:15:00 +0200 Petko Yotov wrote:

> Sorry if the message is a little technical, please ignore it if it doesn't
> concern you.
>
> A user has demonstrated a bug [1][2] when a page is modified and saved as
> draft, then modified and published, then reverted to the pre-draft version:
> the restore is incorrect, wrong lines are restored and duplicated, good
> lines are missing.
> ...
> At the moment in the Subversion pre-release I have commented out a line
> where PmWiki switches the old version of the draft page with the public
> page. (In scripts/draft.php, line 59 commented out.)
>
> With the current solution (A), it appears really fixed but I'm still
> searching for any potential negative side effects ...
>
> There is another possible solution: (B) done correctly, slightly
> more complex to implement: discard all edit history from the
> draft page and only store the diff between the published page
> and the posted text, keeping only the history of the published
> versions. This will not break the restore mecanism.  OTOH, this
> will lose information about authors of intrermediate edits and
> one can wonder if it is ethical.
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1. Does anyone see a problem with the current solution (A) ?
>
> 2. Should we go with (A) or (B) ? Or something else?
>
> Thanks,
> Petko
>
> [1] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/DraftRestore
> [2] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/01007
>

I did "something else" on an organization's pmwiki site a while
ago.

I added a checkbox labeled "Consolidate draft history on Publish"
to a custom EditForm and modified draft.php to display the
checkbox when editing a draft and honor the author's choice when
publishing.

Please see line 9 of the EditForm at:
http://wardsdiskspace.com/pmwikitest/apcu/?n=ChuckG.EditForm?action=source

and the (slightly overcommented) PHP script at:
http://wardsdiskspace.com/pmwikitest/apcu/uploads/ChuckG/draft.xxphp.txt


This has worked correctly since it was installed Sept 2012,
however I realize that I don't support a cast of thousands of
authors and recipes.

Chuck G.