On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 05:45:20PM +0100, Volker Wysk wrote:
> Hi!
Hi Volker.
> Some thoughts on extending WWWOffle. I have a lot of non-changing
> documents in my cache. I don't really use WWWOffle as a cache in this
> case, but as a document database.
Ditto.
> However, there are some problems with this approach. First, when online,
> it causes a needless delay while WWWOffle asks the server for a newer
> version (especially over a busy modem line), whereas I only want the
> version that's already in the cache. Second, more important, the server's
> page hierarchy may have changed in the meantime. The document may now
> reside at a different place, or may have become unavailable.
This is not only inconvenient, but it will *overwrite* the old version.
If the new page only says "Sorry the content isn't here anymore." your
valuable version with the content is lost and this crappy version is in
the cache...
> Rather, I don't do any purging at all.
Ditto. I didn't purge my cache the last, say, 2 or 3 years...
> Another possiblility would be the option to automatically store all
> new versions, so you would get a version history.
Yep. I like this. You could optionally add some code which checks if a
new version is different from the last one (use diff/cmp/md5sums or
something...). If it is, store both, the old and the new file.
If not, just leave the old one where it is.
There should be a configfile switch for this, though, as it will be
*very* slow, I can imagine...
It'd also be possible to add a wwwoffle --purge-dupes option which could
check the whole cache (or a subset of it) for duplicate versions and
remove them...
Concerning the versioning... Maybe this can be combined with CVS
somehow, as CVS already provides versioning and related functionality,
maybe WWWOFFLE could just use CVS to store the files... Yeah, that'll
be slow... anyways, just an idea...
> (Could even be used for backups!)
Definately. I already have lots of pages in my WWWOFFLE cache which aren't
available on the Internet anymore, because the sites closed/moved etc...
> Does this sound like a good idea?
Definately!
Uwe.
--
Uwe Hermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/
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:wq
