Fossil understands check-in comments and ticket text to be Wiki/HTML. Let's say that the mimetype is "text/x-fossil-wiki". This approach worked well for us on CVSTrac (which was where many of the ideas in Fossil originated) because it allowed hyperlinks to other check-ins, tickets, wiki, etc to be embedded in the check-in comment text.
However, using text/x-fossil-wiki as the language of comments and tickets means that characters like < and & and [ have to be escaped using <, & and [. This is confusing and non-intuitive. People have complained. And I am now moving toward the view that the use of text/x-fossil-wiki for comment and ticket text was a mistake. I'm considering making the default representation of check-in comments and tickets be text/plain. For display on web pages, hyperlinks in [...] would still be decorated using <a href=>...</a> markup, but the text would be unaltered and character-for-character the same as what the user originally typed in. There will probably be a configuration option to determine the default mimetype for check-in comments and ticket text, with options being either text/plain or test/x-fossil-wiki, with the (new) default being test/plain. There would also be options to determine if whitespace in check-in comments is displayed or if is coalesced and the text filled. The question now is how to do this in a backwards compatible way. There exist repositories (such as Fossil itself) with lots of text/x-fossil-wiki check-in comments. Possible solutions: (1) Just change the display format and do not worry about legacy commit-comments. There are not that many check-in comments that look different as text/x-fossil-wiki versus text/plain. If a few cases the use of text/plain is unacceptable, those few comments can be edited. (2) Always assume text/x-fossil-wiki for check-in comments that were entered prior to some cut-off date (say 2012-12-01) and assume text/plain thereafter. Perhaps the cut-off date can be changed for individual repositories using a configuration option, with a default value of 2012-12-01 or 2013-01-01. (3) Add a "use text/plain" mark to new check-in comments. Check-in comments (and ticket text) are rendered in text/x-fossil-wiki by default but as text/plain if they contain the new mark. There are a couple of possible ways to add the "use text/plain" mark: (3a) Extend the artifact format by adding optional mimetype fields to the end of C and J cards. (See http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/fileformat.wiki for background information on what C and J cards are.) This is the cleanest approach, but it means that new check-ins could not be understood by older versions of Fossil. It would force people to upgrade. (3b) Add text "\0P" or "\0plain" to the end of the text in C and J cards that should be displayed as text/plain. The encoding used on the cards themselves interprets the "\0" to be a NUL character (ASCII 0x00) which means that nothing after the "\0" is actually displayed. And so the "P" or "plain" suffix is harmlessly ignored by legacy versions of Fossil. This approach seems more hackish, but is completely backwards compatible. (4) Other ideas? Please fill in your suggestions. Whatever route we go, I'll probably start making changes in a branch over the coming weekend. So your timely feedback is appreciated. Thanks. -- D. Richard Hipp [email protected]
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