web commit by joey

[ikiwiki.git] / doc / about_rcs_backends.mdwn

diff --git a/doc/about_rcs_backends.mdwn b/doc/about_rcs_backends.mdwn
index ea7a9ac892d4ed154f87fbe3eaee5c1cdfb3da61..197f093946cee2284f9d3024989309cbf3ac4d36 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/about_rcs_backends.mdwn
+++ b/doc/about_rcs_backends.mdwn
@@ -1,16 +1,16 @@
-## A few bits about the RCS backends
+# A few bits about the RCS backends
 
-### Terminology
+## Terminology
 
 ``web-edit'' means that a page is edited by using the web (CGI) interface
 as opposed to using a editor and the RCS interface.
 
 
-### [[Subversion]]
+## [[Subversion]]
 
 Subversion was the first RCS to be supported by ikiwiki.
 
-#### How does it work internally?
+### How does it work internally?
 
 Master repository M.
 
@@ -28,12 +28,12 @@ see [[commit-internals]].
 You browse and web-edit the wiki on W.
 
 
-### [darcs](http://darcs.net/) (not yet included)
+## [darcs](http://darcs.net/) (not yet included)
 
 Support for using darcs as a backend is being worked on by [Thomas
 Schwinge](mailto:tschwinge@gnu.org).
 
-#### How will it work internally?
+### How will it work internally?
 
 ``Master'' repository R1.
 
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ separated parts in ikiwiki.
 
 What repository should [[RecentChanges]] and [[History]] work on?  R1?
 
-##### Rationale for doing it differently than in the Subversion case
+#### Rationale for doing it differently than in the Subversion case
 
 darcs is a distributed RCS, which means that every checkout of a
 repository is equal to the repository it was checked-out from.  There is
@@ -74,3 +74,51 @@ doesn't really differ from the other checkouts that people will branch
 off from R1.
 
 (To be continued.)
+
+
+## [[Git]] (not yet included)
+
+A patch with full [Git](http://git.or.cz) support is at <http://people.debian.org/~roktas/patches/ikiwiki/git.patch>. Regarding the patch, Recai says:
+
+I have been testing it for the past few days and it seems satisfactory.  I
+haven't observed any race condition regarding the concurrent blog commits
+and it handles merge conflicts gracefully as far as I can see.
+
+As you may notice from the patch size, GIT support is not so trivial to
+implement (for me, at least).  Being a fairly fresh code base it has some
+bugs.  It also has some drawbacks (especially wrt merge which was the hard
+part).  GIT doesn't have a similar functionality like 'svn merge -rOLD:NEW
+FILE' (please see the relevant comment in mergepast for more details), so I
+had to invent an ugly hack just for the purpose.
+
+Some other notes:
+
+- There are two separate helper packages in git.pm. To keep things self
+  confined, I haven't split it up.
+
+- I've used a (mini) Debug.pm during the tests and made it a separate file
+  for the convenience of others.  It relies on the "constant folding"
+  feature of Perl, so there shouldn't be a runtime penalty (at least this
+  is what the 'perl -MO=Deparse shows', haven't made a real benchmark).
+
+- rcs_notify() has not been implemented yet (I have noticed it after I
+  finished the main work).
+
+- GIT backend uses the gitweb for repository browsing (the counterpart of
+  ViewCVS).
+
+- There might be some subs in GIT name space which you may prefer to move to
+  the main code.
+
+- Due to the reasons explained in the code, I've written an rcs_invoke()
+  wrapper.  May be there should be a better approach to reach the same
+  goal.
+
+- There are some parts which I may change in future, like using a global
+  rcs_fatal_error and the ugly error reporting code in _rcs_commit.
+
+- Documentation is missing.
+
+It works for me, but of course in the end, the final decision is yours (due
+to mostly GIT quirks, the implementation is not clean as SVN).  Feel free
+to fix/delete/add whatever you want.  Hope it doesn't have any serious bug.