Re: plans for reference management

Roman Joost wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 10, 2005 at 01:07:31AM +0200, Clemens Klein-Robbenhaar wrote:
[snip]
>>  Because updating the references each time someone edits a document seems
>>a bit overkill to me I feel the step of approving a document (or some other
>>versioned content) seems to be the right time to fetch the references
>>contained in the approved version.
> 
> But it may be too late after publishing the document that an author is
> informed about broken links. So, he has to alter and
> publish the document again to fix the broken links. That are to steps to
> get a document with correct links in it. But you're right, if the
> document contains a vast amount of links, it'll be overkill...

How slow is checking a link for existence in this system? If this is 
reasonably fast, then it's quite doable to do it on every kupu save. 
Harder, especially due to the feedback to user issue, might be the forms 
editor, where only parts of the document get edited, and you don't want 
the whole document be checked each time. You could of course extract the 
links from only the part but it'd be hairy.

Perhaps Clemens' later proposal about a button to check references makes 
most sense, especially as a first step.

[snip]
>>  As far as I understand Romans intention he wants to go into a different
>>direction, e.g. improving the ability to check external links.
> 
> Okey, well yes, I never thought of developing a product which does
> reference management. Just a product which checks internal and external
> links like the CMFLinkChecker does. Sorry for the confusion ...

It's useful anyway, I think a "let's keep it simple" and reusing 
existing codebases like CMFLinkChecker is an excellent way to tackle 
this hairy set of issues and get somewhere reasonably quickly. In the 
past, when Infrae discussed these issues, we tended to be bogged down by 
things like "when someone moves something, the links still need to 
work!", which is extremely nasty in the details. If you can ignore that, 
it should be simpler.

>>  Roman: If we want to coordinate our work on improving the current
>>SilvaReferenceChecker checker, how do we do that? I do not have the resources
>>to set up a public CVS server or the like. I thought about an archive at
>>SorceForge maybe, but the last time I asked on this mailinglist if
>>other developers of Silva add-ons would be interested in having some
>>"Silva common add-ons" repository there I got no response thus I did not
>>tried that so far.
> 
> Well, such a "collective" sounds nice indeed. I think, I could use the
> CVS server from gocept for such a product. If we have more extensions
> for Silva and it makes sense to collect them in a sourceforge project
> I'll go for it. Btw. we might think of using berlios.de - they offer a
> SVN repository instead of CVS.

I've done the simplest thing I could think of, which is to offer a 
section of the Infrae CVS for such projects. So here's the Zone:

http://cvs.infrae.com/zone/

About the Zone:

"""
Welcome to the Zone. This is the part of the Infrae version control
system which contains projects not initiated or maintained by
Infrae. We offer this as a service to the development community around
Infrae's projects, such as Silva. The projects do not have an official
supported status within Infrae, though of course we hope that the
projects here will eventually become ready to be so!

If you would like to add a project to the Zone, please contact Martijn
Faassen at [email protected]
"""

This is probably going to change eventually, as one day we'll move to 
Subversion (we actually have plans that are becoming concrete now, so 
this WILL happen, just can't say when), and we also want to look into 
reorganizing the repository layout a bit in general, cleaning up old 
cruft. We also may want to visually distinguish Zone projects (which are 
not necessarily infrae supported) from non-Zone projects in the ViewCVS.

Clemens and Roman, you already have access. If anyone else wants to have 
access, please drop me a mail or talk to me on freenode irc and we'll 
see what we can do.

Regards,

Martijn