UsingPerforceWithTwiki < Support

Question

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions about the feasability of using Perforce in place of RCS for TWiki? Not that I have anything against RCS, but we currently use Perforce and have a lot of experience with it.

I'm also interested in maybe using TWiki as the front end to our documentation system, which is currently stored in Perforce. A TWiki front end would be a lot easier to work with than the native Perforce UI.

TWiki version:01 Dec 2001
Web server:any
Server OS: any
Web browser: any
Client OS: any

-- MartinWatt - 13 Apr 2002

Answer

There is now a framework for adding new storage backends to TWiki, so this is possible - see RcsLite. However, TWikiWithCVS was also investigated before this, and turned out to be a lot of work, and the same probably applies to Perforce. The RcsLite framework would help, but there might still be core code changes needed, particularly to cope with CVS-style conflict checking and merges (if Perforce supports that).

It might be easier to import your docs into TWiki, then keep RCS and just develop export features (e.g. using TextFileExport) so that TWiki topics can be separately checked into Perforce (perhaps after a document production step, e.g. converting a set of topics into an HTML/XML document, or some other format - see TWikiForBookAuthoring and PrintUsingPDF). This would let you get most of the benefits, e.g. you could check in a certain version of some or all TWiki pages along with a certain release of the software, and let you check it out again in read-only form.

My main suggestion is to really think about your workflow, and the features and benefits you want from some sort of Perforce integration, in order to work out whether a simple switch from RCS to Perforce as a backend will give you what you want.

-- RichardDonkin - 14 Apr 2002

I think a perforce interface into twiki would be of great value. Many places already have a perforce system, with procedures in place for backup and restore.

-- DougRansom - 25 Dec 2002

I've just setup Twiki for our dev team, and we are heavy perforce users. We want to have twiki use perforce directly, so that we can edit files with or without twiki. We aren't opposed to doing some of the work necessary to accomplish this. I haven't been following TWiki development, but it seems that TWiki is most of the way towards being backend agnostic. To me, it seems that we should be able to write another backend (ala RcsLite), and any core changes are bugs that should be fixed. Once we get perforce working it should be much simpler to get any other backend working. Thoughts?

-- LukeCloss - 30 Dec 2004

Luke, the storage backend has been designed so that modules for different version control systems can be created. It is possible that there bugs in the design or code (which can be fixed); and the current design does not account for concurrent changes like in CVS / SVN. Best to follow up with an enhancement request topic in the Codev web.