ikiwiki/doc/bugs/Monotone_rcs_support.mdwn

#Ikiwiki plugin for the Monotone revision control system.

I've just made a patch to the ikiwiki code that allows it to use the [Monotone](http://monotone.ca/) revision control system.  It is available at:

<http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~willu/monotone-ikiwiki.diff>

At the moment it is basically complete.  At present rcs_notify() is implemeted but untested, the rest is implemented and tested.

In an older version of the patch 
there was support for simultaneous commits, but any conflicts left the repository in an unmerged state which had to be cleaned up using the non-web
monotone interface.  The user's data was still stored, and the user was informed if that happened.

The current version of the patch handles conflicts through the web interface.  It is still not perfect as it will break if there is a rename that conflicts with a web change (but so will the other Rcs plugins I think).  It also commits a revision with conflict markers if there is a conflict requiring such markers... ick.

Note: This patch requires the Monotone perl module, which is only available in Monotone 0.36 or later.  The module is in the Monotone contrib/ directory.  While 0.36 is relatively new, that Monotone module itself will work with a monotone binary back quite a few releases.
Apparently this module did't make some versions of the monotone 0.36 release tarball.  It is available from the monotone repository here: <http://viewmtn.angrygoats.net/branch/changes/net.venge.monotone>.

> The setup instructions to add 40 lines of code to monotonerc is pretty frightning stuff.
> Is there some way this can be automated? --[[Joey]]

>> I've committed a bunch of this to monotone so that in future it could be removed.  I didn't
>> want to remove it from the instructions until it was in a monotone release though.

>>> Fair enough. Didn't realize you were a monotone committer. :-) As long as it goes away later I don't mind having it in setup initially.

>> The real issue here is that there is a mismatch between ikiwiki's conflict model and
>> monotone's.  I need to get code into monotone to add conflict markers - that is
>> the code that goes in the monotonerc.  In practice I could add this to any file I know
>> how to reference and I can then tell monotone about it with a command line arg.
>> Is there a good place for such a file?

>>> There's not a really good place. /usr/share/ikiwiki/foo would do, 
>>> except for the systems where /usr/share/ is elsewhere. It would need to be
>>> runtime configurable just like the basewiki and template locations are.
>>> 
>>> Hmm, another option would be to put it in the wiki's .ikiwiki directory when
>>> ikiwiki starts up. This is the technique used by the search plugin to create
>>> various data and config files that hyperestradier needs.

> Having rcs_commit return a warning message when there's an unresolved conflict
> isn't right; that message will populate the page edit box. You might want
> to use the error() function here?

>> It should never reach that case, so yes, I can change that to error.

> There'an incomplete comment ending with "note, this relies on the fact that"

>> erg... sorry, will fix.

[[tag patch]]