ikiwiki/ Revision Control Systems

Ikiwiki supports using several revision control systems for storing page histories.

Ikiwiki started out supporting only Subversion, but the interface ikiwiki uses to a revision control system is sufficiently simple and generic that it can be adapted to work with many systems by writing a plugin. These days, most people use git.

While all supported revision control systems work well enough for basic use, some advanced or special features are not supported in all of them. The table below summarises this for each revision control system and links to more information about each.

feature git svn bzr monotone mercurial darcs tla cvs
ikiwiki-makerepo yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes
auto.setup yes yes incomplete yes incomplete yes incomplete yes
rcs_commit_staged yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes
rcs_rename yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes
rcs_remove yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes
rcs_diff yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
rcs_getctime fast slow slow slow fast slow slow slow
rcs_getmtime fast slow slow slow fast no no no
rcs_preprevert yes no no no no no no no
rcs_revert yes no no no no no no no
anonymous push yes no no no no no no no
conflict handling yes yes yes buggy yes yes yes yes
openid username yes no no no yes yes no no

Notes:

  • Lack of support in ikiwiki-makerepo or auto.setup can make it harder to set up a wiki using that revision control system.
  • The rcs_commit_staged hook is needed to use attachments or comments.
  • rcs_getctime and rcs_getmtime may be implemented in a fast way (ie, one log lookup for all files), or very slowly (one lookup per file).
  • Openid username support allows avoiding display of Google's ugly openids.

There is a page with details about how the different systems work with ikiwiki, for the curious.