Question

How do I go about using/implementing CVS in place/instead of RCS? The reason I ask is because as far as I've seen, two or more people can edit the same page at the same time but each person's changes will be on a respective and individual revision. I would like to have the page be smart enough to update by merging the changes made by people at the same time and be on one single revision(the CVS way). This would make life a lot easier! Can this be done? and if so how?

• TWiki version:December 2000, March 2001
• Web server:Apache 1.3.12
• Server OS:Linux (Debian)

-- JessicaOrtiz - 23 Aug 2001

Answer

Even though it would seem a simple matter of changing the corresponding twikycfg variables, it is not trivial to do, as there are many places in the TWiki code that handle locking and such directly.

TWiki relies on some user cooperation, and if two or more people are editingthe page at the same time then it seems that they are not heeding the "topic is locked by another user" warning.

Check the discussions on PackageTWikiStore, CvsWeb, and RCSproblemsOnTWikiBeta15May2001.

-- EdgarBrown - 26 Aug 2001

Just as an aside, sometimes I (not the original poster) edit "offline" by copying and pasting a page to my local TWiki and then editing it, and then later copying and pasting it back to TWiki. (So far, I don't do it that often on twiki.org, but expect to do it more often when my WikiLearn site is up.) This can create the same kind of problem, which I can workaround by making sure nothing has changed since I took the copy for editing (which I don't do religiously, but should). (Or, if it has changed, doing a second copy and paste from twiki.org and then doing a local merge (which I haven't tried so far).)

On another wiki I used to post a notice saying that I was editing a copy offline, but people complained about that, probably rightfully so.

I do the offline edit for two reasons:

• faster "turnaround" in the edit, preview, view cycle on long pages (although not as much difference as I was hoping for -- my local twiki seems somewhat slow, and, even though it is a 200 mhz. processor with 128 MB of RAM, I expected it to be faster -- sometimes it seems no faster than the connection to twiki over my 33.6 shared modem (but it does avoid delays during lost connections, and my ISP likes to disconnect me for "hanging on" or whatever he calls it))
• using other tools (editors) to make edits faster / more efficiently

Why do I bring this up? Primarily to see if anybody has any suggestions on how to improve the process I use, but also so that people are aware that some idiots (me) do things like this and to consider possible modifications in twiki to facilitate (or avoid the need / desire for doing things that way).

(My major editing presently occurs when I am translating pages I created on other wikis to twiki, which I am really doing entirely offline (and most of them do not get uploaded to twiki), so maybe once I am done with that effort it will be a much smaller issue for me. (If anybody has any "automatic translators", I am translating pages from swiki (as used on www.swiki.net), the original wiki, and the original wiki clone at www.clug.org.)

-- RandyKramer - 27 Aug 2001

See ReadWriteOfflineWiki and DistributedTWiki

-- MartinCleaver - 28 Aug 2001

SupportStatus:

AnsweredQuestions