Note that the size of TWikiPreferences is important when considering startup time, as it is always read.

The settings in question are:

• 'Mail this topic' mailto: link - can be included in topics, templates or skins
  • Set MAILTHISTOPIC = Send a link to this page

• 'Mail this topic' link text
  • Set MAILTHISTOPICTEXT = Send a link to this page

• URL for current topic
  • Set TOPICURL = https://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPreferencesNeedsGardening

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Apr 2005

None of the above are referenced anywhere in the release package, so I killed them. Local sites can always put them back.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 11 Apr 2005

This might break some code on existing deployments (Skins, TWikiApplications, etc). I prefer to keep these settings; gaining a few microseconds does not justify silently failing TWikiApplications somewhere out there. There is a good chance that TOPICURL is used somewhere.

RichardDonkin put these three settings into TWikiPreferences on 13 Apr 2002, may be he can elaborate. A search on %TOPICURL% has 10 hits on TWiki.org, %MAILTHISTOPIC% also 10. See also EmailThisPageLink.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Apr 2005

The justification for removing them is simplification. TWikiPreferences is a nightmare to edit - there is very little guidance as to which variables matter and which don't, the important stuff is interleaved with the unimportant, and there is stuff in there - like this - that amounts to white noise. Your justification for keeping this bloat is extremely thin (10 occurrences in 3 years!). This change is clearly documented in the DakarReleaseNotes - I'll even go further and add a search so the installer can see for themselves.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 11 Apr 2005

The decision procedure should be simple...

• If the variable is not documented and not used throughout TWiki, it should be removed.
• If the variable is documented and not used throughout TWiki, we should go through a deprecation process.

-- ThomasWeigert - 11 Apr 2005

I'm OK with leaving these settings out of TWikiPreferences, though I suspect the performance gain will be very small. This assumes that not many people have used these settings and it is easy to add them back in to local prefs pages.

It would be nice to move them into the docs somewhere as a suggestion for 'easier mailto links' - they are just a way of making it easier to do 'mail this page' type links in skins or in the topic list. The current docs for this feature are thin (only in syntax summary, see EmailThisPageLink comment from AndyGlew), so putting the docs in the right place would help as well as speeding up TWiki loading.

I suspect that %TOPICURL% may be used more widely than the mailto features - might be worth putting this in code since it's a one line addition that should not increase load time much.

-- RichardDonkin - 12 Apr 2005