On Jun 14, 2018, at 7:02 PM, Scott Doctor <sc...@scottdoctor.com> wrote:
>
> Looking through my current project fossil UI, it seems that instead of adding
> a forum module, what about a modification to the Tech Notes module.
In the past, I’ve suggested that a forum could be constructed from a
combination of the current ticket and wiki mechanisms. The pieces are already
all there.
The hard parts I can see from this distance are:
1. Threading, which is strictly optional, but I waaaant it.
2. Email integration, which we have many uses for once it’s available, so the
cost amortizes.
I was going to say add “Quoting,” but it appears that Fossil’s Markdown
processor already handles nested block quotes. Neat!
> What I need is a way to simply link and group various tech notes, which may
> span hundreds of notes over long periods of time.
Are you maybe viewing the future through the past’s lens? If you’d had a forum
feature from the start, would you have written the top-level tech notes as
posts and the subordinate ones as replies, possibly with [links] back to the
relevant checkin ID?
This would work like the “talk” page on MediaWikis, where the stream of ideas
over time is visible, unlike on the main article page, where you normally only
see the latest edition of the article.
> Need a simple way to link a tech note to one or more tickets and other tech
> notes
Fossil’s existing artifact reference mechanism should work just fine for this.
That’s one of the primary advantages of having this inside Fossil instead of
integrating some third-party forum system.
The feature should also allow creation of new forum threads from checkins, etc.
I called it “reply to checkin” in a previous message.
> I am thinking if a problem re-surfaces in the future, a search or browse can
> find and resurrect a thread to help with discussion and documentation about a
> potential solution, or to simply document results of experiments.
I do this today with comments in the code, and I believe it would be less
discoverable to have such commentary in the repository timeline instead. (Code
tells what, comment tells why.)
But that doesn’t argue against any of the features being discussed, just
against this one use of the proposed features.
> Need a simple way to add links within the body of a tech note to reference
> other tech notes and tickets referenced in the text (hyperlinks).
In both Markdown and Wiki syntax, bracket links [abcd1234] work today.
If you want explanatory text instead of a hexbarf link, you can do it in
Markdown by [specifying the viewing verb in the URL](/info/abcd1234). The
equivalent in wiki syntax should be clear.
I’ll admit that that is not terribly discoverable, but I’m struggling to come
up with a syntax that wouldn’t be ambiguous. The closest I’ve come is
[this]([abcd1234]) but that’s hardly discoverable. It’d have to be documented.
> Also a simple way to add a link in the body text to specific files in the
> repository.
That’s already available with the embedded documentation feature:
For more information, see [the source code](/doc/trunk/src/foo.c).
In some cases, you might prefer a /file URL instead. Say “fossil help /file”
for more info.
If you did not know that that form of help command was even possible, say
“fossil help --www” to be further surprised. :)
> I think a few modifications to the tech notes module would make it usable
> like a lab notebook. I can make notes about whatever, have multiple threads
> of unrelated issues, and be able to manipulate linkages later so that I can
> scavenge and organize my notes when I write a paper or documentation about my
> project. This would be along the lines of what a writer would do using
> software such as scrivener.
That sounds a lot like a forum feature to me. It happens to be now-you talking
to future-you, but it’s the same mechanism.
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