[dokuwiki] Re: proposals (read if interrested in plugins, db storage and stuff)
- From: Harry Fuecks <hfuecks@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 10:22:54 +0200
Just butting in as this is something I feel strongly about.
I think Andi has made exactly the right decision to store content in
flat files. Aside from obvious reasons like it's easy to administer
flat files from the command line, when it comes to storing content,
placing documents in a database is like fitting a round peg into a
square hole.
There's a short but relevant comment on the Mediawiki mailing lists
(who do use a database), while there were discussing parser
performance issues;
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-May/029347.html
"[...] In hindsight, storing the wikitext in a database was a mistake.
There's already a wonderful piece of software highly optimized and
scalable for storing randomly accessed variable-
sized chunks of text with lots of tools for backup, replication, and so
on; it's called a file system. [...]"
From my point of view the only reason why people are asking for MySQL
is because they're running on a shared host with limited access /
permissions to the file system and / or no shell access (or perhaps
not enough experience with Bash). While I can understand the problem
think it's a bad idea to re-design Dokuwiki just for this purpose and
I can imagine it being difficult to support both well - either one or
other will become the "evil twin", never working well and eventually
suffocating it's brother.
Returning to the issue of dbs in general, the two general benefits of
a DB is it helps with indexing the data stored - things like searching
are easier to implement effeciently - and it allows you to define as
many "properties" as you like for a given "item" (i.e. wiki page) e.g.
a "Last Modified by" column or a "Number of hits" column. The
additional properties in particular are more work when using the
filesystem.
For Dokuwiki I knocked up a couple of pages with thoughts on how to
tackle this here;
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:discussion:indexing
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:discussion:metadata
From my point of view, making the search work fast is "simply" a
matter of moving the search operation from being "runtime" when the
user requests it to being "offline" in a cron job which builds indexes
for fast searching.
I'm pretty sure Andi won't give in anyway but my vote is "No to DBs
and Dokuwiki!". Better would be putting a page on the wiki listing web
hosts where Dokuwiki runs well.
On 7/27/05, Andreas Gohr <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 17:33:06 +0000
> Matt Pascoe <hornet136@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > At this point in time however I prefer the simplicity of the flat
> > files for storage. If we can make dokuwiki be configurable to support
> > either one (or even a mix of both??!?) that would be great. Just dont
> > forget about the flat files. :)
>
> Do not worry about that - I will not accept patches which _remove_ flat file
> support. Database usage should be completely optional.
>
> Andi
>
>
>
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