I'm aware that JSPWiki doesn't perform any operations (that I'm aware
of) on the authoring history. But I think that reduces the value
of the
wiki (if users can't - definitively - learn who the previous
editors of
a page are). Maybe I'm missing something, but you indicate that
"[h]umans .. will of course care" - but isn't that a pretty important
consideration?
Absolutely!
But I was purely talking from the technical point of view. And, that
means that there is no inherent technical advantage in storing the ID
of the user identity vs. storing the username itself into the repo
for the purposes of viewing the history of a page (in fact, there is
a tiny performance penalty for doing that). Also, storing the ID
means that we cannot ever truly remove an user account either, since
losing it means that we lose the mapping metadata from an abstract ID
to a real name (unless that person has never changed a page, which in
turn means that removal is a nasty op where you have to check every
version of every single page to be able to determine whether it can
be removed).
/Janne
