2025-06-05 Oddμ history
========================

On fedi, @reidrac@mastodon.gamedev.place mentioned that Oddμ doesn't
keep a page history. The idea is that the wiki is only accessible to a
small circle of trusted people and therefore we don't need a history
to fight spam and vandalism.

Some people like backups so that they can go back in time, however.
One could run a cron job once a day that does a snapshot using rsync.
For my local copy of the wiki I use a Makefile with a target for that:

    SHELL=/usr/bin/fish
    
    download:
    	rsync --archive --exclude '*~' --delete --itemize-changes sibirocobombus:alexschroeder.ch/wiki/ .
    
    diff:
    	rsync --dry-run --archive --exclude '*~' --delete --itemize-changes . sibirocobombus:alexschroeder.ch/wiki/
    
    upload:
    	rsync --archive --exclude '*~' --delete --itemize-changes . sibirocobombus:alexschroeder.ch/wiki/
    
    snapshot:
    	rsync --link-dest ../wiki --archive . ../wiki-(date --iso-8601)/

I run make snapshot in a directory called wiki. The command syncs
all the files from the current directory to a directory containing the
current date, e.g. ../wiki-2025-06-05 and in order to save space,
unchanged files are simply hard-linked to the file in ../wiki, i.e.
the current directory. If I edit files using an editor, the original
is renamed and a new copy is created. Therefore, the hard-linked
snapshots retain their content.

One could clean up older snapshots with a cron job and just keep the
last week, for example.

If people need access to the old copies, one would do this via the web
server and serve the snapshot directories as static files.

If one wanted an even more traditional "no forgiving nor forgetting"
system, there's always a version control system like git.

gitwatch.sh is a shell script that can watch a directory using
inotifywait. When it detects changes, it waits for a few seconds and
then adds and commits any changes.

gwatch is a program written in C that does the same thing.

Access to the git repository is a different problem, now: One could
have a cron job run git push every now and then and people access the
repository elsewhere. Or one could use something like cgit to serve a
read-only copy of old revisions.

#Oddμ