[pmwiki-users] page history question

Tegan Dowling tmdowling at gmail.com
Mon Jun 18 17:10:53 CDT 2007


On 6/18/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


What about suppressing a NotifyList-generated message, or an RSS sorted by
most-recent?  Which options would allow for those, and/or are there issues
with them?
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