[pmwiki-users] page history question

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Jun 18 14:50:43 CDT 2007


On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 08:13:17PM +0100, Hans wrote:
> Monday, June 18, 2007, 5:55:04 PM, Sandy wrote:
> >> I'm guessing there are changes in the attributes, particularly the
> >> lastmodified field, and maybe author. 
> 
> Okay I tested this:
> Opened a page, clicked once inside the text area,
> clicked Save. No actual page content change.
> Now this is recorded as entry in RecentChanges
> and in the page history with an empty entry.
> What changed is the LastModified time stamp and
> LastModifiedBy author name, even though no modification has happened.
> 
> It would be nice if this behaviour could be suppressed.

PmWiki used to work exactly this way -- i.e., a post operation that 
didn't change the text would be ignored, such that there would be no
entry in the page history or RecentChanges.

However, when we introduced pagelist indexes, it became important
that saving a page would also regenerate its attributes
(such as the targets= attribute) and any associated indexes,
as well as perhaps record who was reponsible for doing that.
So, we no longer wanted to ignore such posts.

There were other complications that arose from ignoring
"identical text" posts, which would often require explanation on
the mailing list, along with suggestions to "add blank lines
to the end of a page to get it to really save".  It hasn't happened
in such a long time that I've now forgotten exactly what the 
complications were, but I remember they were part of the reason
for switching.

So, I don't think we can turn off same-text posts entirely.
What we could potentially do, however, is change the code so
that the page is still saved and attributes are generated,
but no RecentChanges entry is made and an entry isn't
made in the page history.

This does have the potential to introduce some confusion,
because in such a case the $LastModifiedBy author might not
be the same as the last author listed in the page history.
Similarly, someone looking at the page history might note
that the page's last modification time doesn't match the
last entry in the page history (although this occurs already,
e.g., when someone sets a password on a page).

Another possibility would be to allow the page history to
record the empty entry in the page file, but not display
empty page histories when ?action=diff is invoked.
That keeps the record in pagehistory a bit more intact,
without being annoying to others.

Personally, I think that if we just suppressed the
updating of RecentChanges on same-text edits, then
everything would probably work out okay.  But I'm open for
opinions here.

Pm



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