Question

More an RCS question than a strictly Twiki related one. But maybe someone has the answer.

I have a few similar twiki webs that have grown separatly and I'd now like to synch their WebForms and and META infos which are semantically identical but diverge in their spelling. That means I will have to modify a lot of topics, but I don't want me to show everywhere as the last author.

Basically, I would like to update my topics without changing their last revision informations (Number, Author, Date). I want my mods to transparently replace the last revision. Is there a way to achieve that ?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Environment

-- JeromeBouvattier - 10 Jun 2005

Answer

There is an undocumented "repRev" feature, reserved just to the TWiki admin group to "fix" a topic without changing the user, version and timestamp. Read the "how to" at the end of TWiki.cfg.

Please note that it is not recommended to use this feature because you circumvent the audit trail; you risk to lose the user's trust in the system.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Jun 2005

I don't think there's really any straight forward way to go about this - it can't be stressed enough that trust in the audit trail is not easily build, but certainly can be lost very quickly.

An alternative approach to Peters is simply to use your favourite search & replace editor functionality on the .txt-files in the /data/SubdirX directory. In this way, instead of pushing the changes on to the "previous" topic revision (the "repRev" way), you'll introduce "pending changes" to the topic. What will happen is that the next user saving the topic will save the changes you introduced as well, together with his own update.

In this way, you are done quickly, your new searches will work fine etc, but the history (rdiff) will not show the correctly updated info in the topics changed, until next save.

Anyway, whatever approach you go with, you might benefit from setting up a (temporary) note in WebPreferences (Set BROADCASTMESSAGE) for the webs you are introducing the changes in - that way at least you can be somewhat sure that your users will know that there might be "something rotten" going on

-- SteffenPoulsen - 12 Jun 2005

Thank you guys, it really helped. I ended up doing my refactoring using repRev . That worked great but took me a loong time. Maybe next time I'll use Steffen's trick.

As I said, my mods were only about unifying the WebForm and formfield values accross several webs similar in their structure. That should be transparent for users and I think they won't even notice anything. OTH, they would have been upset to see my name as the last updater all over the place.

-- JeromeBouvattier - 13 Jun 2005