[pmwiki-users] clue me in -- remove group name from pagelist?

[Jo Rhett]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 04:08:27PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> There cannot be a hard-and-fast rule that applies for every configuration
> variable in every situation.  The counter-example to the one you give
> here is when someone performs an upgrade and suddenly their system
> no longer works as it did before because PmWiki has changed a default
> value.  There are places where we should bias things towards the
> distribution defaults, and other places where we bias towards
> the administrator's settings (always, of course, giving the 
> administrator *some* mechanism to override whatever course 
> PmWiki chooses).
 
Agreed on this.

> You claim that this is an upgrade problem waiting to happen.  I disagree.
> Let's suppose that Alice, our wiki administrator, overrides PmWiki's
> default setting with the following:
> 
>     $FPLPageTemplateFmt = array( 'Site.LocalTemplates', 
>       '{$SiteGroup}.PagelistTemplates');
> 
> Now then, we conjecture that some future version of PmWiki changes
> the distribution default of $FPLPageTemplateFmt to be something
> else -- let's say the new version uses '{$SiteGroup}.NewImprovedTemplates'
> instead of '{$SiteGroup}.PagelistTemplates'.
> 
> What happens to Alice's site when she upgrades?  Well, she's overriding
> the default setting of $FPLPageTemplateFmt, so PmWiki will continue to
> use the Site.LocalTemplates and {$SiteGroup}.PagelistTemplates pages
> Alice had set up before -- i.e., the system works exactly as it did 
> before the upgrade.  This is generally what an administrator wants --
> they expect that after performing an upgrade, any customizations they
> have made will continue to work (as they worked before the upgrade).
 
Correct, her pages will continue to work as before.

But now she downloads a cookbook or plugin that uses some templates that
are in NewImprovedTemplates and they don't work as she expected, and she
has no idea why.  Worse, she wouldn't think of this parameter as being at
fault, because she hasn't touched it in many, many moons!

This is exactly why it should be easy to append or prepend to the stock
defaults without actually overriding the stock defaults.  Those who choose
to override do so at their risk.

-- 
Jo Rhett
senior geek
SVcolo : Silicon Valley Colocation