Question

This applies to two new installations.

When I edit a topic, it works perfectly. I inspect the RCS/topicname.txt,v file and it has incremented the revision, say from 1.5 to 1.6, and all looks good. The topic displays the new text. Perfect. Except that the bar at the bottom of the page now shows it is at rev 1.1 and so does the first line of hidden text in the topicname.txt file.

Subsequent edits also go perfectly in every way, except that the revision displays as 1.1 all the time despite RCS knowing better.

The above applies when I edit supplied topics with their supplied RCS files installed, e.g. in Know or Sandbox, as well as when I write new topics then go back and edit them the next day. I have waited over an hour (my timeout is 10 minutes), toggled the two buttons (unlock, minor change) all ways, defaulted them all ways, and re-edited the file as a different user. I have tried deleting all RCS files and starting afresh, with old and new topics, or with old topics with their old metadata manually removed first. I've got in there and hacked the topic's version number to what RCS thinks (e.g. 1.5) and edited again. I've toggled group-write permissions to the related files and directories. I've consumed half a jar of Moccona, three solid pizzas, and an apricot pie between attempts, but even that didn't help. Always the same thing, back to 1.1 again.

I have read all similar questions and none of them quite apply to my case, e.g. they edited within an hour or something.

Could somebody please remind me what silly little thing I have missed?

Environment

-- SueBlake - 29 Jul 2003

Answer

Not at all sure what's going on here - all I can suggest is to log the exact RCS commands being run and do some TWikiDebugging (which says how to do this logging).

-- RichardDonkin - 29 Jul 2003

It seems to be ignoring $useRcsDir set to 1. If I put the txt,v file into the web directory it works. If there is another copy of the txt,v file also in ./RCS directory, it works but the one in the subdirectory gets updated, not the extra copy of the rcs file in the web directory. I think. I'll have to check more and confirm this behaviour later in the day, but it definitely seems related to location of rcs files.

-- SueBlake - 29 Jul 2003

This is not getting any clearer and I'm running out of things to check. To test I unarchived a fresh TWiki, ran the FreeBSD installation script after inspecting each line carefully (sets up directories, changes permissions and rcs owner, etc), and copied across my user home page, .htacces .htpasswd and TWiki.cfg, so there were no plugins and no patches added. I checked that "1" was set for $useRcsDir and moved all rcs files into RCS subdirectories. I also turned off modperl and stopped apache then restarted apache. Still the same problem.

The log files for apache and twiki show no errors. I couldn't get any debug output by uncommenting the debug lines in Store.pm. If I put all the rcs files back into the web directory, it seems to work but I'm not sure how consistently. I've seen topics leap from revision 1.1 to 1.5 after a single simple edit when the files are all in the same directory, though it also writes to the subdirectory when it feels like it. Every word of this report is the same on two machines in two different towns, plus a laptop. The only thing in common is me. Mystifying...

If nothing springs to mind I'll just go back to the previous release of TWiki, I've made that one work well several times.

-- SueBlake - 30 Jul 2003

Have you tried this with $useRcsDir set to 0?

-- RichardDonkin - 30 Jul 2003

Not yet. I'll try that and report back.

By the way, I've now demonstrated that everything about RCS is working fine. There's only one thing going wrong: determining the revision number to write into the metadata. For example, r1.6 has the correct contents in both files, but is labelled r1.1 in the topic's metadata. I tried to find what chooses the number to write in there, and got lost in perl.

-- SueBlake - 30 Jul 2003

The $useRcsDir flag is not to meant to be switched in a running installation. If you do not have special needs (like 1000s of topics in a web) I suggest to use the default one, e.g. have all RCS files in the web directory itself with $useRcsDir = 0.

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Jul 2003

Well, I have this currently used configuration with its $useRcsDir set to 1 at installation and unchanged since then. According to my reading of the docs and prior successes, I shouldn't switch it back to 0 now, but it should work fine if I keep it at 1 because it was installed that way.

Are you saying the opposite? Should I expect trouble with useRcsDir=1 at install/setup time, but not expect trouble if I revert to 0 on a running system?

Sometimes it's so hard to be good.

-- SueBlake - 31 Jul 2003

You can switch back to $useRcsDir = "0", but then, at the same time, you need to move all RCS files out of the RCS directories to the parent dirs.

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Jul 2003