Re: Idea: Crossbreed a source code control system and a wiki

[mjd-perl-pm@plover.com]

Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>:
> But then this sounds isomorphic to cvs with an optional web interface,
> which already exists.

No, it's not, because the optional web interface to CVS is not a wiki.
A wiki is not only a web interface to a text repository.  

> So perhaps this wiki would interface flexibly with cvs,
> subversion, bitkeeper (if religion permits), opencm (if obscurity
> permits), etc. That is, it would be a front end to an existing system,
> one of many ways to access the back end.

I think it's important that the wiki be primary.  When stuff is in a
wiki, people are always organizing, classifying, commenting,
annotating, and cross-linking.

If there were a wiki, but some people were primarily interacting with
the source code as a bunch of plain source files, those people would
be cut off from the main flow of the wiki society that surrounded the
source code.  It would be like trying to be a perl code hacker without
being subscribed to p5p---except that a wiki is a much better way for
a large group of people to collaborate on a large project than a
mailing list is.  Then conversely, the people who *were* using the
Wiki would keep seeing changes appear with no explanation.

So that's why I think it's important to understand that this is a Wiki
for developing a software project, not a web interface to a source
code repository.  In principle, you could do the same thing just by
having lots and lots of course comments, and a cleverly-enabled source
code editor---but people don't.



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