From: joey Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:49:20 +0000 (+0000) Subject: web commit by http://ethan.betacantrips.com/: virtual pages? X-Git-Url: https://sipb.mit.edu/gitweb.cgi/ikiwiki.git/commitdiff_plain/76f39885108f3b95fe1b5bd0b6a89d5c01f9d103 web commit by http://ethan.betacantrips.com/: virtual pages? --- diff --git a/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn b/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn index 71b9dfed6..dc5d3611b 100644 --- a/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn +++ b/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn @@ -31,4 +31,37 @@ >> I have more thoughts on this topic which I will probably write >> tomorrow. If you thought my other patches were blue-sky, wait until - >> you see this. --Ethan \ No newline at end of file + >> you see this. --Ethan + +OK, so here's how I see the RecentChanges thing. I write blog posts and +the inline plugin generates RSS feeds. Readers of RSS feeds are notified +of new entries but not changes to old entries. I think it's rude to change +something without telling your readers, so I'd like to address this. +To tell the user that there have been changes, we can tell the user which +page has been changed, the new text, the RCS comment relating to +the change, and a diff of the actual changes. The new text probably isn't +too useful (I have a very hard time rereading things for differences), +so any modifications to inline to re-inline pages probably won't help, +even if it were feasible (which I don't think it is). So instead we +turn to creating diffs automatically and (maybe) inlining them. + +I suggest that for every commit, a diff is created automagically +but not committed to the RCS. The page containing this diff would be +a "virtual page", which cannot be edited and is not committed. +(Committing here would be bad, because then it would create a new +commit, which would need a new diff, which would need to be committed, +etc.) Virtual pages would "expire" and be deleted if they were not +depended on in some way. + +Let's say these pages are created in edits/commit_%d.mdwn. RecentChanges +would then be a page which did nothing but inline the last 50 edits/*. +This would give static generation and RSS/Atom feeds. The inline +plugin could be optionally altered to inline pages from edits/* +that match any pages in its pagespec, and through this we could get +a recent-changes+pagespec thing. + +You could make an argument that I care way too much about what amounts +to edits anyhow, but like Josh says, there are use cases for this. +While this could be done with mail subscriptions, I can think of sites +where you might want to disable all auth so that people can't edit +your pages. --Ethan