[darcs-users] "Static Gitit" site.

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 3:49 AM, Daniel Carrera
<daniel.carrera at theingots.org> wrote:
> Trent W. Buck wrote:
>>
>> If you're saying "just let everyone edit the same working tree", then
>> you can easily lose information if two people try to edit the same wiki
>> article at once.  Moinmoin works around this, for example, with
>> per-article advisory locking -- the same functionality seen in RCS,
>> about the oldest and least powerful VCS around.
>
> I think that's what wikis generally do. So I guess a wiki could be compared
> to the oldest and least powerful VCS. The ability to merge has been around
> for along time, and a modern VCS (e.g. not CVS) should be very good at
> merging (atomic, handling renames, etc).
>
> To be clear, I don't think that *in principle* it is wrong to use a VCS as a
> site backend. I just point out that I've seen this attempted before by
> OpenOffice for many years and they never got it right. That doesn't mean
> that it is not possible. But it does suggest that it is not straight
> forward.
>
> Daniel.

There are advantages to it, though. We gain the possibility of people
using gitit on top of a darcs repo of articles and codes - and now
they have a distributed bug tracker, and distributed doc revision. Or
maybe they do something like set up a repo with web access, and now
everyone can edit the source files and improve the haddocks, and
occasionally the maintainer pushes the good documentation fixes to the
canonical website. (Or maybe there's just the one repo, and the
developer is being very very liberal with the 'commit bit'.)
As far as I know, there's no sensible concept of 'darcs send'/push
with a centralized wiki like Wikipedia; there's some export
functionality, but that's per article/file and is all or nothing.

-- 
gwern