Versioning without file system bloat
I regard the versioning of the Wikipages as highly redundant, because all the versions are stored as separate files, instead of just the changes as in CVS. Why isn't CVS used in MoinMoin? Is it possible to configure MoinMoin to use CVS?
The simple file storage is more robust. No, MoinMoin does not support CVS (I guess you mean RCS storage) currently. 2.0 will allow you to write a CVS storage backend.
Yes, I refer to revision control. For the time being, I consider implementing a simple solution in my installation: If there are numerous (say, 100) versions older than a week, then they are packed together to a tar.gz archive or some other file compression method dealing with this redundancy. If the user wants to access one of these very old versions (in diffs and reverts) the corresponding action automatically unpacks the archive (in case of a revert) or only takes out the needed file (in case of a diff). This way, we would have robustness (faced with spam?, losses of files by interrupted moin.cgi execution (say, by a system crash)?, other dangers?) without getting too many files and using up too much space. Would this be a good idea?
- Thomas thought about tgz for 2.0. Maybe we will implement this. But it is for sure that implementing it in the current code is not very easy.