After figting with an instalation of this particular TWiki beta over my existing TWiki of Dec 2000, I figured out that the problems I was having where due to the direct use of rcs files inside the Store.pm code (something that is not true in the Dec 2000 release).

These versions of TWiki where supposed to be less dependant on rcs, not more, what good is it to have the posibility of changing the version control calls, when there are hard-coded pieces of it inside the code itself???.

The "simple solution" that I see is adding prefixes and sufixes to all the references so that these could be changed (in my case adding "RCS/" as a prefix would work just fine). But this is just a stopgap measure at best.

The cause

I want to place the RCS files into their own directory to reduce clutter.

The problem

The dependencies inside Store.pm make this imposible without modifing the code.

I hope that PackageTWikiStore is removing these added dependencies.

• NicholasLee - 08 May 2001 - Yes, but at the rate I'm working on it at present its probably several months away from being in a worthwhile start. I'll keep this edge case in mind for an eventual RCS storage submodule.

-- EdgarBrown - 08 May 2001

Sorry for all the trouble you've been having, I haven't done any testing of this particular scenario. I'm afraid at least part of the problem was allowing for attachment histories to be in a completely different directory structure. There is now a _traceExec sub at the top of Store.pm; this should help isolate this type of problem. Since a topic has a new directory when it gets an attachment, an RCS directory will have to be formed at this point. Additionally a rename is affected. It should be relatively straight foward to parameterise all of this to work with the traditional RCS directory under the original file.

-- JohnTalintyre - 08 May 2001

I've made a few small changes so that this support is now available with a new TWiki.cfg entry, useRcsDir. I hope to upload to cvs next Monday.

-- JohnTalintyre - 08 May 2001

Sorry it took so long - but, now uploaded. See $TWiki::useRcsDir in TWiki.cfg Please update after you've tested.

-- JohnTalintyre - 08 May 2001

No responses on this fix - so assume okay.

-- JohnTalintyre - 12 Jun 2001

Sorry John, I didn't actually expect for a fix (I just took all the files out of the RCS folders, and removed these). I decided to wait for the next formal release hoping to get that fixed.

Thanks for doing that, I guess that when TWikiReleaseSpring2001 finally comes out it will be working,.... ;^)

-- EdgarBrown - 14 Jun 2001

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Original support message:

Question

I tried installing the TWiki beta version on an already working TWiki instalation (dec 2000 version), but now any operation related to RCS seems to be broken in some way.

Note that all this happens under the Beta (which I have separated into its own newbin directory), the older TWiki instalation still behaves properly.

• Diffs: don't work at all, just show a blank template. It shows: Difference Topic Support (r1. - 22 Mar 2001 - EdgarBrown), note the lack of a nuber after r1..
  • The engine-logs list a series of:

rcsdiff: /home/twiki/data/Main/RCS/WebHome.txt,v revision number 1.xx too low
...
co /home/twiki/data/Main/RCS/WebHome.txt,v revision number 1.1 too low

• Edit: opens the edit box correctly, but....
  • On new topic creation: stores the text fine.
  • On topic modification: breaks with the error:

/usr/bin/rcs -q -o /home/twiki/data/Sandbox/TestTopic7.txt
rcs: missing revision range after -o

I have obtained different errors on other conditions, but these involve slight modifications of the code.

The view scripts, and attachment scripts work fine, as do the search scripts, so the problems seem restricted just to the rcs sections of TWiki/Store.pm.

Note that I have no problem with command line rcs commands, I can get diffs, change locks, obtain logs with no problem

NOTE: I have separated the *.txt,v into their own RCS directories to reduce the clutter, but this makes no difference to RCS.

• TWiki version: 15 May 2001 Beta
• Web server: Apache 1.3.14-2mdk (mod_perl 1.24)
• Server OS: Linux (mandrake 2.2.19-4.3mdk)
• RCS version: rcs-5.7-3mdk

-- EdgarBrown - 07 May 2001

Aaaaarrrrrgggggg....

After fighting with this for a couple of days, the problem is in my last NOTE, when I took the files out of the RCS directories into the webs, it seems to work fine!!!!.

But of course, if I leave the RCS directory in, the *.txt,v file gets placed in it, breaking the scripts again.

Did you add some perl code to parse the rcs files directly????!!!!, I guess this should go into a BugReport

-- EdgarBrown - 07 May 2001

TopicClassification:

BugResolved