Re: Git Wiki improvements

From: Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jbms@cmu.edu>
Date: Apr 14, 2008, 16:18 UTC
Message-ID: <87skxos93x.fsf@jeremyms.com>
In-Reply-To: <BAYC1-PASMTP10A8BA28CC2999519EA0B2AEE80@CEZ.ICE>

Sean Estabrooks <seanlkml@sympatico.ca> writes:

> On Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:58:29 +0100 (BST)
> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Johannes,

>> While this would seem a good idea from the viewpoint of using as much of 
>> your own dog food as possible, I think that the Wiki is fine as-is.  
>> Especially since I like to spend more time hacking on Git than on the 
>> Wiki, and I expect most people to feel the same.

Show 5 quoted lines

> It's not just about eating dog food but improving the chances that people
> use and update the wiki with useful stuff.  Adding the ability for people to
> clone a  copy of the wiki onto their own systems and use it offline can only
> help.  If people are permitted to push changes back to the wiki it has the
> potential to change the rules of the game in a positive way[1].

I've thought about this possibility myself, but it seems that the clone, edit, commit, push cycle may not really be ideal for a wiki. For one thing, it is hardly ever necessary or useful to have anything more than per-file commits. Also, if there are a large number of simultaneous users trying to push to the repository, you could run into a problem whereby you can never successfully push because ever time you try, it is not a fast-forward, so you have to fetch then merge (we can assume the merge is just done automatically because e.g. only different files were modified) then try to push again, but before you have a chance to retry the push, the branch head may have changed again due to another push.

I suppose in practice this may not be a problem for the git wiki as it may not have so many contributors, but this would certainly be a problem for e.g. wikipedia.

More generally, though, although we may all dislike using webpage interfaces, actually having to keep the entire wiki updated locally doesn't seem terribly useful. Really, you just want a way to edit a particular page in your text editor, have various commands available for e.g. previewing, and have commands available for showing the log information with a nicer interface than a web page.

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard