Hi devs, These are the current code style rules for committed XML wiki pages: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/XWikiXMLFilesCodeStyle
= Proposal 1 = I was personally not aware we had documented these practices that we had been applying since forever. It's good that we have them, but there seems to be no mention about committing changes for the "creationDate", "date" and "contentUpdateDate" fields. Part of the committers (including myself) are applying the old practice of omitting changes to the date fields when committing a change to an XML wiki page. However, since this practice is not written and agreed upon, its usage is not consistent. So, the proposal is to include the rule of not committing changes on the date fields of XML wiki pages. The rationale, AFAIR, includes: * After an upgrade, users should not see "ghost" modifications in their wiki (e.g. when sorting by date in the Page Index). This affects even more manual imports with the "as backup" option enabled. * On release, any date changes of a default translation XML page will produce N other XML page changes, for each translation of the modified page (due to the way l10n exports the translations based on the latest version of the default language of that page). * others? = Proposal 2 = Now, building on this, I would like to make a second proposal (which I don't believe deserves a separate thread): 1) Let's remove all date fields from committed XML wiki pages in our source repository 2) Let's make sure that the XAR import properly handles empty or missing date fields and falls back on the current date 3) Let's update the xar:format goal to remove the date fields (configurable, since it could they might still be needed by some content projects, etc.) 4) Let's make the build fail (xar:verify) if the XML wiki pages contain date fields (again configurable, as above) Note: All the above still depend on the first proposal of not committing date changes to XML files (which will be simplified by point 3) above). The rationale for this is that we have always wanted to fix our "dates problem", since after installation, the wiki is populated with pages created in 2009, which is extremely odd to users that have just installed XWiki. This second proposal sounds to me like a solution for that. WDYT? Thanks, Eduard
