Re: WikiWebLogs and PartialLocks (was Re: [Phpwiki-talk] New jeffshacks snapshot. )

[Steve W. <sw...@pa...>]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Jeff Dairiki wrote:

> > In this case it might be better to just go ahead and create a user table,
> > since we will have one anyhow, no matter what. User auth is coming and
> > storing users and pages in the same table will cause problems.
>
> That is the kind of answer I was looking for, but how, exactly, is it
> going to cause problems?

Oh, just that I imagine later on we will want (or admins will want) more
flexible, accessible access to user info. If you want to generate a list
of all users who accessed the wiki in the last ten days, how would you
write a SQL query to do that if all the user info is in page metadata?
Just an example.


> To clarify, again, my proposal:
> In the new API, arbitrary key/value meta-data can be attached to any
> page.
>
> The way you (the PHP programmer) does this is via an interface like:
>    $page = $dbi->getPage('JeffDairiki');
>    $page->set('is_homepage', 1);
>    $page->set('password', 'gobbledygook');
>
>    ....
>    if ($page->get('is_homepage')) {
>        $passwd = $page->get('password');
>        ...
>    }
>

I like this idea... having hashes for whatever one might want is always
useful!


> I'm also, of course, trying to avoid implementing yet another database
> interface (with mechanisms for backing up and restoring, etc...)

quite understandable...


> I suppose my diff code could still use a little cleaning up --- and
> could
> certainly use docs --- but it's basically ready to go.

Cool.


> On the subject: I want to add the ability to generate word-level diffs,
> a la emacs' ediff mode.  This would be particularly useful for wikis,
> where a "line" can be a whole paragraph --- if only one word has been
> changed, often it's very hard to spot.   I think this is a fairly
> straightforward enhancement: compute the diff normally (by lines), then
> foreach block of changed lines, split the blocks into words and compute
> a diff by words.

And I'd still like to redo the diff output to look like sdiff, or what you
get from cvsweb.cgi... very readable...

~swain

---
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