On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 3:35 PM, sebb <seb...@gmail.com> wrote: > AIUI, the LDAP servers don't provide any useful history of changes. > > So the only way to record changes is to record snapshots and detect > differences between them. > > At the moment Whimsy creates snapshots every 15mins or so, and logs > the diffs in an e-mail. > > However it's not particularly easy to work out which LDAP group is > involved unless the addition happens to be near the start or end of a > group which then appears in the diff output. > > One solution would be to compare the JSON trees and log the diffs with > more context. > However it would still be tricky to reconstruct a specific snapshot. > > So I'm wondering whether it would make sense to store the snapshots in > an SVN or Git repo? > This would automatically keep track of changes, and one could use the > SCM tools to show the diff in context. > > Thoughts?
I'm not certain what the use case is for a historical record of changes is. Nor am I convinced that the web based diffs that tools like viewvc and github provide are the most suited for the types of queries I can imagine. That being said, should there be interest in queries of the form "when was committer 'X' added to PMC 'Y'", I could see a tool that did a binary search through revisions, parsing the json, and using that to determine how to proceed could make use of a SVN or Git repository. If this is what you are envisioning, git is better aligned for this usage than svn in that checking out a different revision can be done without a server interaction. Whimsy could expose the repository itself readonly for others to clone and perform offline analysis. Whimsy could also host tools that do specific queries. Is this along the lines of what you were envisioning? - Sam Ruby
