Question

While it is nice to have browser access from anywhere, most of the time I have direct access to the server boxes. It seems silly to use a browser's poor TEXTAREA widget, while you have tons of good editors at your hand. But without resorting to root I cannot touch the files. Now, that seems even sillier...

If I understand corrrectly, the files are always locked by the web server's owner. Is there a (suid?) program, which does the necessary rcs + twiki lock stuff, to reserve the file for local interactive use?

• TWiki version: 20001201
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Unixes

Answer

You'll be opening yourself up to a can of worms if you do this. Several issues to deal with apart from unix user permissions. First twiki does some minor translation of between the format in the TEXTAREA and the format stored in the rcs file. Second there are some issues dealing with rcs locks which cause more difficultly than its worth.

It might be possible to write a script that check out a copy of the page via perl's LWP library. Allowed you to edit it, then checked it back in via the standard mechanism. I also have some thoughts on an email interface.

Not avaliable anytime soon though.

The web interface is easy enough, you can change the size of the TEXAREA box so that helps. If need be you can c&p from your editor.

-- NicholasLee - 15 May 2001

You might want to investigate using recent versions of Lynx on the server box - these let you specify an external editor such as vi or Emacs for the TEXTAREA field - see UseHtmlEditorOfChoice for details.

-- RichardDonkin - 16 May 2001