RE: Hosting of the cookbook

MJ Ray wrote:

> >> Is it possible to mix traditional Revision
> >> Controlled pages with a wiki?
> > I'm not sure what you mean by this.
>
> I'm referring to the alternative idea of having a
> schematics-maintained book with wiki annotations.

By schematics-maintained, you mean in CVS?  The problem with that would be
mixing access techniques.  If wiki-annotated content was stored in CVS like
any other file, then it should be easy enough to set up wiki software to
provide a formatted view of that content.  However, if you used wiki
software on the central repository to actually edit the files, you'd
immediately run into a conflict with the version control - unless you had a
wiki that integrates with CVS (are there any?)

The easiest way to be safe in this situation, would be to disable editing of
pages via the wiki.  If one of the goals is to make editing more accessible,
this isn't good.  I would think the need to use CVS would be at least as
much of a barrier to casual contributors, as having to create an account.
(And it looks like we're going to be eliminating the need for accounts.)

I suppose something could be set up to try and do a CVS commit behind the
scenes if someone edits a page via the wiki, but then you'd need to handle
conflicts.

I did look into the question of Twiki & CVS a bit.  There's lots of material
about this on the twiki site, e.g.:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/GetRidOfRcs
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiWithCVS
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/AdviceForCVSingLocalTWikiInstallation
...however, the upshot is there's no good off-the-shelf solution because of
the way Twiki uses RCS.

The best bet would be to use a good front end for RCS that supports access
to remote files (e.g. via http, ftp, or ssh/scp).  Ironically, CVS would be
such a program, but it imposes a repository structure which Twiki doesn't
conform to.

Anton



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