RCS is very under-utilised in TWiki as it stands. It provides the edit locking mechanism plus a basic "safety net" to allow manual merging of changes (or at a psychological level, remove inhibitions about making them?). One thing I would find useful would be a way to view not just a previous version of a topic as of a revision or date, but a way to view the whole web (or webs?) as of a particular date. I was going to call this topic Back In Time Browsing but I believe that is trademarked by Perforce who use the term for what their web client can do while browsing a perforce depot/repository.

I think this would have general utility on any wiki, but the reason why I would find this facility useful at work is that we have topics that are barely (never?) edited after creation that simply display/use/claculate information gathered from other more volatile topics (and their forms) using a formatted search. I often find myself wanting a way to look at last weeks/months/ whatevers rendering of such topics. It would be nice if this mode was "sticky" so that one could follow links etc and remain in this (read-only) mode. In a way this is a skin feature/behaviour (like printable view), but it would certainly seem to need the core topic read code to be modified (I haven't looked at this yet to get any idea of what is involved). rcs supports checking out a file as of a particular date/time (-d) so that in itself shouldn't be much different to the current option to specify a revision.

There are some issues with this if one is expecting moves/renames to work - this would require either a more powerful backend than RCS (CVS?) or some additional work to search an "attic" when looking for topic history.

The concept sounds simple enough? Is it useful enough to be considered for the core?

-- DarrylGreen - 21 Nov 2002

This is an interesting idea. Funny, I just discussed this s few days ago with a colleage at work. If yoy ignore the renames it should not be too difficult to implement, as you say, RCS has a -d feature. The user interface should be made intuitive, for example one entry point like in the WaybackMachine, then always an indication on top what date you are browsing (possibly an edit field to change the date), and a way to switch it off again.

One complication are attached files like an embedded image from TWikiDrawPlugin. When browsing the past it should browse also the attached version at that time.

-- PeterThoeny - 22 Nov 2002