[Pmwiki-users] Re: Why heirarchy?

[chr@home.se]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> [resending to pmwiki-users]
> 
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 03:50:39PM -0700, Fred Chittenden wrote:
> > It seems similar
> > safeguards should be added to the wiki page naming parsing logic to prevent
> > MyGoals.MyGoals from ever being created.  
> 
> ...except that this is actually a design feature in the current
> version of PmWiki, to allow a group's default home page be the name
> of the group and not just HomePage.
> 
> Regardless, that detail is not specific to the scenario I just described.
> If someone had created MyGoals.HomePage then the same problem would have
> existed (i.e., links to [[MyGoals]] would have automatically gone to
> MyGoals.HomePage rather than {$Group}.MyGoals).  

> The only way to avoid that would be to say that such links can *only* go
> to sibling pages, and historically that's been a bit too restrictive
> relative to what people want (indeed, it wouldn't work for the RecSoccer
> scenario you described).

I know I desired "PmWiki" to automatically refer to PmWiki.PmWiki, but
that was when I enthusiastically used CamelCase for all links. So I felt
that the duplication in "PmWiki/PmWiki" was pointless. These days I'm not
so fond of camel case and would probably write [[PmWiki/PmWiki]] instead
of "PmWiki/PmWiki". The duplication is still annoying of course, but I
think writing [[/PmWiki]] would be acceptable to most people.

I am not sure if writing "/PmWiki" without the square brackets would work,
maybe a single "/" would be too commonly occuring in normal text?

> I'm simply pointing out that until there's a clean and clear mechanism
> for linking to pages in other groups, whether they're "subgroups" or
> "parent groups", then these sorts of spooky-action-at-a-distance sorts
> of things can occur.  With multiple group levels, it's even more likely
> to occur than it currently is with just one group level.

The likelyhood also increases with the number of groups at the top level,
so if you have lots of groups and you use just one group level, all of
them will be at the top, and thus you have an increased risk.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr