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Why isn't it statically-genereated, but generated dynamically by CGI? It
seems like it could be beneficial to have it rendered in the post-commit
hook, just like everything else in the wiki.
I hope to statically generate it eventually, currently the problem is
that it takes at least several seconds to generate the recentchanges
page, and adding several seconds to every page edit is not desiriable. If
the time can be reduced it could be done, I'm also not adverse to
adding an optional way to statically render it even at the current
speed. --[[Joey]]
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Also, is it planned/desired that recent changes generate the same
information in RSS feed format? This seems like it could be a useful way
to keep track of the wiki as a whole.
This is used by various interwiki type things, I think, so should be
done.. --[[Joey]]
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Lastly, would it be possible to use the recent changes code with a
pagespec? I understand this sort of infringes on territory covered by the
inline plugin, but the inline plugin only puts a page in the RSS feed
once, when it's created, and I imagine some people -- some deranged,
obsessive-compulsive people like myself -- would like to know about the
changes made to existing pages as well as newly-created pages.
That would work rather well for pages like [[todo]] and [[bugs]], where
you want to know about any updates, not just initial
creation. --[[JoshTriplett]]
Of course you can use email subscriptions for that too.. --[[Joey]]
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
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 also exclude edits that have
"minor" in the commit message (or some other thing that marks them as
unremarkable).
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
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