Re: Doing content-based mtime determination

Yeah...  This is kind of a pain in the ass.  cb_filestat is the callback
that returns the mtime for a given file and it gets called in a bunch of
places internally and in various plugins.  The problem is that cb_filestat
is operating on the filename and mtime (as returned by the previous
cb_filestat call) of the given entry--it doesn't have the entry object.

There are a couple of bad reasons for this.  The first is that building an
entry object is somewhat expensive because of our entry parsers and such.
In the blosxom handler we do a filestat on all the filenames, then sort
them, then build entry objects out of the ones we're interested in
rendering.

I'm not really sure if that was a great idea or not.

So, to solve your specific problem, one possibility is that you could
implement cb_filestat.  Your function would open the file (possibly using
the FileEntry stuff), force the entry to read the file in and thus grab
the metadata for the file, and then parse that for the mtime.

Another possibility is that you run an external process that goes through
all your entries parsing out the mtimes and storing them in a centralized
file with the key being the entry file name and then have your cb_filelist
function pull the mtime from that.


Let me know what you're thinking.  We're due for a PyBlosxom 1.1
release--there are several fixes that are sitting in the CVS codebase (the
specifics escape me at the moment) and maybe this is a good time to
reevaluate some of the "interesting" things we did and undo/simplify/fix
them.

/will


On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, David Ascher wrote:
>
> I was trying to write a plugin that basically determined the effective
> mtime of an entry based on an in-entry tag like:
>
> TIMESTAMP::2002-04-01-00-00
>
> I like this approach over the date-in-filename approach because
> mucking with the filename means mucking with the URLs of permalinks.
>
> Unfortunately, it appears that the entry hasn't been parsed by the
> time cb_filestat gets called.  Is the right approach in this case to
> have a cb_filelist handler?  It seems it would be too late, and other
> plugins which limit things based on date would have gotten it 'wrong'
> by the time cb_filelist got called.
>
> Any advice appreciated.
>
> --david


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