Official Foswiki Weblog

One of the great strengths of Foswiki is that it stores topics in plain text files. This feature has proven its worth time and again, as Foswiki is able to quickly adapt to organisational change, easily support external processes that write to topics, and is quickly accessible for emergency measures. For an admin who has login access to the server, it’s very easy to use the command-line to make bulk changes to many topics simultaneously.

In Foswiki 1.1.4 we addressed a nasty bug that was inherited from the very earliest days of TWiki. This bug could result in serious history errors such as the wrong username being attributed to edits, incorrect revision numbers, and broken revision histories. Unfortunately there was a side-effect of this fix that anyone who modifies topics on the server needs to be aware of, and take action on.

Any process (or person) that changes a .txt file on the server must make sure that the corresponding .txt,v file is left with a file date that is equal to or more recent than the .txt file.

If you don’t do this, Foswiki will be forced to constantly re-read the .txt,v for the correct revision history, which can affect performance. Also, when such a topic is edited, Foswiki will create a new revision attributed to the “UnknownUser” to record that the topic was changed outside of Foswiki’s control. This is the correct behaviour in the general case, and will save less experienced users a lot of pain. However more experienced users may know that their changes are ’safe’ and that no change to the topic history is required. In this case, it is trivial to update the file date on the .txt,v file. In summary,

• After making any manual change to a .txt file on the server make sure that the corresponding .txt,v is ‘touched’ (use the UNIX ‘touch’ command, or simply text-edit and save the file)
• Scripts that make bulk changes to files – and external processes that write .txt files – should be modified to ‘touch’ the .txt,v files after writing.
• If you have already made such a change but can’t remember which files you changed, you can use the following linux command line to ‘touch’ all .txt,v files (this is perfectly safe)

find /path/to/foswiki/data -name '*.txt,v' -exec touch \{\} \;

Crawford Currie Development

Foswiki is now over 3 years old, and its still an extremely active project: Congratulations and thankyou!

The Foswiki Association’s Board has just elected the new Office holders:

• Chairman: Sven Dowideit
• Vice Chairman: Crawford Currie
• Treasurer: Oliver Krueger

As the new chairman, I hope to continue the great work that Crawford did in guiding our foundation so far, and take the opportunity I have to thank Kenneth for the work he did the last 2 years, and for the experience he has passed on to the Board in general.

For 2012, I have suggested that we work on improving our communications both within our community and towards the outside world – for example by developing more microblogging tools like the Extension News, and then creating a regular newsletter from those feeds. Given that foswiki is a do-ocracy, that means I just volunteered myself to building some more tools for foswiki.org, and then to write newsletters.

In case you’re still reading this, the Board has a question for you – we now have 1,385 euros in the bank, is there anything we could use this money for that would positively impact on the community, its growth and visibility?

Have a happy and productive 2012

Sven Dowideit Misc