WikiPatches/PatchPipe

Another RiVer dream.

I may, or may not, deliver the seeds of it to you this month, next month, sometime, never.

That the v1.00 UseModWiki comes out of the tarball with possibly fewer options built in than at present, and a set of patch pipes to implement local options.

This feature is definitely NOT implemented in 1.0. (There are a lot more features in 1.0. :-) --CliffordAdams

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UserStory?: the user wanted to install ElMoro's /GetAdminBar and SunirShah's /MetaKeywords patches, so they have previously used

PatchPipe.pl|AdminBar.pl|MetaKeyword.pl >/somepath/somedir/customwiki.pl

and it would install just the chosen options.

Now they decide to use RiVer's /CiwiNi patch as well. The naive user would type

PatchPipe.pl|AdminBar.pl|MetaKeyword.pl|CiwiNi.pl >/..../newcustomwiki.pl

while those who have some grasp of the UnixWay might spot they could use

CiwiNi.pl </somepath/somedir/customwiki.pl >/..../newcustomwiki.pl

both users will get what they intended. The first form is the only form given in the documentation, as it is the easiest for a naive user to understand. In my experience, people who have no idea of the difference between -thing and |thing on a command line very often learn to use them correctly as magic incantations.

It's one of the things I really like about Unix, and it was so good that MSDOS adopted it right from the start. Some users would find it easier to run a series of pipes than to edit a file

Strictly speaking the scripts are "filters" and only the | are pipes; but PatchPipes? sounds nicer than PatchFilters?. Poetry trumps Pedantry. Besides, this way I get to run the joke about it not just being a pipe dream...

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This system, if adopted by other installers for their home-grown pathches, would ease the adoption of a new version of wiki. Providing the PatchPipes?.pl initialisation script is revised to suit the new release, the existing PatchPipes? might actually still work if the code they actually alter is still in the new release.

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Maybe you will object that we cannot possibly test all combinations of patches - true. But my reply is that I do not totally believe that every possible combination of options has been tested in the current design.

In both designs we say, the defaults work, we have tested likely combinations of options, and looking at the code we have no reason to expect problems.

--RiVer