Question

I have the same problem reported in VersionHistoryDoesNotWork - when I pull up the History page for a topic, the revisions are listed but all the sections are empty except for Revision 1. However, I can view individual revisions just fine so it's just the comparison part that's hosed.

There's nothing in TWiki's warning log or Apache's error log that corresponds to this problem.

I have the rcs, grep, and diffutils packages from sunfreeware.com installed, all in /usr/local/bin, and have the path to them listed first in SafeEnvPath.

In VersionHistoryDoesNotWork, Peter Thoeny suggested to "Make sure that rcs is built referring to the right GNU diff", but I don't know how to do that. I also am not familiar with rcs, so while I can get the syntax from configure, I don't know how to fill in most of the variables to generate an actual command line for ci, co, or rcs. So if those are indeed useful next steps to try, then someone will have to provide instructions. Thanks!

Environment

-- JohnWorsley - 13 Sep 2006

Answer

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Okay, I got something to show up in History, by using configure to remove the rcsdiff parameters that apply to diff, leaving only parameters for rcsdiff itself. So now that command line looks like: /usr/local/bin/rcsdiff  -q -r%REVISION1|N% -r%REVISION2|N% %FILENAME|F%

Comparing what I get in a History page to what I see in twiki.org History pages, I am missing the context, the 'Line x to y' parts that help you understand where in the topic the changes were. I have lines that presumably supposed to be that, like "Line: 1 10 to 1 11" but there are no lines actually listed.

I can probably live with this if I have to, but I would prefer to figure out why the diff parameters don't work for rcsdiff like they're supposed to. So that's what I would appreciate some help with now - what can I do to troubleshoot that?

-- JohnWorsley - 04 Oct 2006

For reference, twiki.org's Solaris has this for the {RCS}{diffCmd} setting: '/opt/csw/bin/rcsdiff  -w -B -r%REVISION1|N% -r%REVISION2|N% -ko --unified=%CONTEXT|N% %FILENAME|F%

-- PeterThoeny - 28 Nov 2006

Curious, that looks a lot like the setting I had initially, when I wasn't getting any revision history. I tried adding each of the parameters you have that I don't. -w and -ko didn't cause any problem, but didn't fix my 'Line: 1 23 to 1 24' problem either. Adding either -B or --unified=%CONTEXT|N% made the Added/Changed section of each revision disappear.

So we're both running Solaris (9 in my case, I believe), but you have two rcsdiff parameters I can't use, that seem to be the key to a full revision history. The package I installed from sunfreeware was rcs-5.7-sol10-intel-local.gz. What other information would be useful for troubleshooting this?

-- JohnWorsley - 04 Jan 2007

I tracked down this command to find out which diff rcs is using: strings /usr/local/bin/ci | grep diff. When I run it on my server I get this:

/usr/bin/diff
diff failed
unexpected EOF in diff output
bad diff output line: %s
diff line number too large: %s
diff output command line too long
backward insertion in diff output: %s
backward deletion in diff output: %s

How do I get my RCS to use /usr/local/bin/diff instead?

-- JohnWorsley - 02 Mar 2007

You probably need to rebuild rcs. Alternatively, remove /usr/bin/diff and create a link to it from /usr/local/bin/diff (check if this does not break anything else.)

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Mar 2007

This can also occur in some cases when the topic contains an html comment split over multiple lines. (TWiki-4.2.3) The generated history includes the html tag that opens the comment but not the closing tag. The effect is that most of the page contents are treated as part of a comment and are hidden. If you view the page source you will see the revisions.

-- DanielJach - 2012-02-28