doc/todo/mercurial.mdwn



rcs_notify is not implemented (not needed in this branch --[[Joey]])
Is the code sufficiently robust? It just warns when mercurial fails.
When rcs_commit is called with a $user that is an openid, it will be
passed through to mercurial -u. Will mercurial choke on this?
Nope. Mercurial doesn't expect any particular format for the username,
though "Name address@domain" is standard. --[[bma]]
The way -u $user is passed to hg commit, there's no way to tell
if a given commit came in over the web or was done directly. So
rcs_recentchanges hardcodes 'committype => "mercurial"'. See the monotone
backend for an example of one that does this right.
The rcs_commit implementation seems not to notice if the file has been
changed since a web edit started. Unlike all the other frontends, which
use the rcstoken to detect if the web commit started editing an earlier
version of the file, and if so, merge the two sets of changes together.
It seems that with the current mercurial commit code, it will always
blindly overwrite the current file with the web edited version, losing
any other changes.

Posthook: in $srcdir/.hg/hgrc, I have the following
[hooks]
incoming.update = hg up
update.ikiwiki = ikiwiki --setup /path/to/ikiwiki.setup --refresh

This should update the working directory and run ikiwiki every time a change is recorded (someone who knows mercurial better than I do may be able to suggest a better way, but this works for me.)

Try running it with --post-commit instead of --refresh. That should
work better, handling both the case where the edit was made via the web
and then committed, and the case where a commit was made directly.
It can deadlock if the post-commit hook runs with --refresh in the
former case. --[[Joey]]


I have a few notes on mercurial usage after trying it out for a while:


I have been using ikiwiki's --post-commit option without apparent problems. I'm the only current user of my wiki, though.


The ikiwiki.setup file included in ikiwiki works with mercurial's hgserve, which is not the preferred solution. Mercurial's hgwebdir.cgi is more flexible and doesn't require running a server. I have this in my .setup file:
 # Mercurial stuff.
 rcs => "mercurial",
 historyurl => "http://localhost/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/ikiwiki/log/tip/\[[file]]",
 diffurl => "http://localhost/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/ikiwiki/diff/tip/\[[file]]",


I have noticed that running ikiwiki after a change to the wiki adds files to a directory called recentchanges under $srcdir. I don't understand why such files are needed; worse, they are not added to mercurial's list of tracked files, so they polute the output of hg log. Is this a bug? Should mercurial's commit hook be modified to add these files before the commit?


--buo

No, those files should not be added to revision control. --[[Joey]]


OK. I see two problems:


If I clone my wiki, I won't get an exact copy of it: I will lose the recentchanges history. This could be an acceptable limitation but IMO this should be documented.


The history is stored in mercurial. How will it be lost?


The output of hg status is polluted. This could be solved trivially by adding a line containing recentchanges to .hgignore. Another alternative would be to store the recentchanges directory inside $srdcir/.ikiwiki.


I think the ideal solution would be to build $destdir/recentchanges/* directly from the output of hg log. --[[buo]]


That would be 100 times as slow, so I chose not to do that. --[[Joey]]