On 07/16/2012 04:10 PM, Platonides wrote:
On 17/07/12 00:22, Adam Wight wrote:
Hello comrades,
I've run into a challenge too interesting to keep to myself ;) My
immediate goal is to prototype an "offline" wikipedia, similar to Kiwix,
which allows the end-user to make edits and synchronize them back to a
central repository like enwiki.
The catch is, how to insert these changes without edit conflicts? With
linear revision numbering, I can't imagine a natural representation of
the data, only some kind of ad-hoc sandbox solution.
Extending the article revision numbering to represent a branching
history would be the natural way to handle optimistic replication.
Non-linear revisioning might also facilitate simpler models for page
protection, and would allow the formation of multiple, independent
consensuses.
-Adam Wight
Actually, the revision table allows for non-linear development (it
stores from which version you edited the article). You could even make
to "win" a version different than the one with the latest timestamp (by
changing page_rev) one.
You will need to change the way of viewing history, however, and add a
system to keep track of "heads" and "merges".
There may be some assumtions accross the codebase about the latest
revision being the active one, too.
Cool! That's a nice solution because it's transparent to the end-user's
system. However, if we use the current schema as you're describing, we
would have to reconcile rev_id conflicts during the merge. This seems
like a nasty problem if the merge is asynchronous, for example a batched
changeset sent in email.
-adam
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