[pmwiki-users] Proposal: version control for cookbooks recipes

[Joachim Durchholz]

Patrick R. Michaud schrieb:
> Unfortunately, for many cookbook recipe authors the svn requirement
> might be a non-starter.

For the more complicated recipes, SVN (aka Subversion) is actually 
helpful. And it's not difficult to install, and certainly easier to 
manage if there's an update history.

For the simple recipes, SVN is simply overkill. I'd say it's used best 
if the recipe authors decide for themselves whether they need SVN.

That's from the recipe maintainer's side.
For recipe users (i.e. wiki administrators), if SVN is set up to server 
through WebDAV, downloading should be easy and go through an ordinary 
URL - or at least that's what the WebDAV advertisements for SVN say.

 > So, that means that updating recipes will often
> be inconsistent, with some recipes coming from svn and others requiring
> a separate download step.

That situation would still be an improvement over the current state of 
affairs, where there is no SVN even for those recipes where it would be 
helpful.

> (And I really don't want to make svn checkins or sourceforge
> registration into a requirement for contributing recipes.)
> 
> With sourceforge there's also a licensing issue, in that any recipes
> hosted there would have to be provided under a license acceptable
> to sourceforge.

Sourceforge certainly isn't the right place for recipes (at least not 
the non-GPL ones).

> And it might also be the case that if recipes are in a common
> repository then they'd have to have identical licenses, which might
> also be an obstacle.

I'm not aware of any license that makes this kind of restriction.
Distributing on a paid medium is restricted/regulated with some 
licenses, but SF isn't paid.

> Still, there's already a SourceForge project for PmWiki on sourceforge,
> and of course I have a separate svn repository for the PmWiki code
> itself.  If there are any recipe authors that would like to be maintaining
> recipes through subversion instead of the Attach: feature, I think
> we may be able to set something up for that.

I think it would be a worthy addition to pmwiki.org.

Regards,
Jo