[Moin-user] Moin2 Mercurial Backend

[Thomas Waldmann]

> > Will this allow users to check out the whole wiki via Mercurial,
> > edit pages using their favorite texteditor and then publishing
> > them by commit and push? I mean something similar to what Ikiwiki
> > does. That would be an *extremely* useful feature.
> 
> That was the idea when the work on this backend started, but in the mean time
> MoinMoin2 changed a little,

The storage api is still mostly using the item name to access items. I
am on the way to provide an additional way via UUID, though, but that
work is not complete yet.

> and now the content of the items is stored in files that have random names.

That might be mostly due to limitations of the filesystem, like with
non-ascii chars, slashes/colons in item names, maximum allowed
filename/path length, etc.

If one just uses an ID instead of the item name (which can easily either
get computed as hash(itemname) or just stored into item metadata (like
the UUID stuff), these fs limitations usually don't matter.
But: it's not readable.

> So, although you can edit them and commit, finding the
> right files may be nontrivial.

Yup.

But please note that for moin 1.x, this was only different if you had
pure-ASCII or mostly-ASCII names, then you could usually easily find the
right directory. If your page name was in chinese, the directory name
was hex-digits only. This was done for same reason as mentioned above.