[[!tag wishlist]]
[[!toc ]]
Summary
Allow a user to apply an arbitrary diff, in order to modify a given
page (or, even better, a given set of pages).
Rationale
To edit intensively an ikiwiki-powered website can quickly get
annoying for anybody meeting enough of the following conditions:
- living mainly offline
- having no commit access to the RCS backing up the site (BTW, please
note I can send my ssh public key to anyone who asks for, free of
charges)
- hating web-browsers and despising textareas
- loving in his/her own preferred
$EDITOR
... and when one gathers all of these defaults, she/he is on her/his
way to get mad. Soon.
Before it's too late, some dareful ones dream of the following
playflow:
- Go online.
- Update local working copy.
- Go offline.
$EDITOR : write, report, answer, propose- Go online.
- Update local working copy (and optionally fix conflicts between
local changes and remote ones).
- Generate a diff.
- Use a web-browser to paste the diffs (or better, upload them into
a form) somewhere on the wiki, and click "Apply".
- git pull (to reflect locally the fact that the diff has been
applied to the remote repo)
- Go offline.
(This is for sure a bit theoretical: the ones who dream of this would
actually insert various steps about branching, merging and rebasing
random stuff.)
Design
This has to be thought very carefully, to avoid one to apply diffs to
pages he/she is not allowed to edit. Restricting a given diff to
modify only one page may be easier.
Implementation
Also see [[joey]]'s idea on [[users/xma/discussion]], to allow (filtered) anonymous push to this wiki's repository.
Ideally the filtering should apply the same constraints on what's pushed
as are applied to web edits. So locked pages can't be changed, etc.
That could be accomplished by making the git pre-receive hook be a
ikiwiki wrapper. A new git_receive_wrapper config setting could cause
the wrapper to be generated, with $config{receive} set to true.
When run that way, ikiwiki would call rcs_receive. In the case of git,
that would look at the received changes as fed into the hook on stdin,
and use parse_diff_tree to get a list of the files changed. Then it
could determine if the changes were allowed.
To do that, it should perhaps first look at what unix user received the
commit. That could be mapped directly to an ikiwiki user. This would
typically be an unprivelidged user, but you might also want to set up
separate users who have fewer limits on what they can push. OTOH, I'm not
sure how to get this info in an ikiwiki wrapper.. the real and effective
gid are already trampled. So maybe leave this out and always treat it as
an anonymous edit from a non-logged in user?
Then it seems like it would want to call check_canedit to test if an
edit to each changed page is allowed. Might also want to call
check_canattach and check_canremove if the attach and remove plugins
are enabled. All three expect to be passed a CGI and a CGI::Session
object, which is a bit problimatic here. So dummy the objects up? (To call
check_canattach the changed attachment would need to be extracted to a
temp file for it to check..)
If a change is disallowed, it would print out what was disallowed, and
exit nonzero. I think that git then discards the pushed objects (or maybe
they remain in the database until git-gc .. if so, that could be used
to DOS by uploading junk, so need to check this point).
Also, I've not verified that the objects have been recieved already when
whe pre-receive hook is called. Although the docs seem to say that is the
case. --[[Joey]]
