XWiki and SVN as a backend

Hi, I'm investigating what it would take to store (or duplicate) some of the data in XWiki's database in Subversion. Rationale: - A plain text version of wiki pages stored in SVN buys you: - off-line edit, merge, etc - access to the pages using other tools, editors and so on - replication options - versionning, branching etc, and version display via e.g. ViewCVS - insulation from database crashes, with easier incremental backup - a kind of poor-man's content management system - SVN is very robust, reliable, and has a mature Java interface (SVNKit) - if Tomcat crashes a static version of the site can still be served - I have a large static site that is managed in SVN (8 Gb in 40,000 files) which I want to migrate to a more dynamic system. This looks like a significant size job, but we have a fair amount of resources in my team, and possibly we might fund some of the work in the XWiki community if anyone is interested. I wonder if this type of idea has been discussed before, and if anyone has comments on the best way to go about the problem? It seems to me that trying to replace the database entirely with a file-based store is too much work and would lead to performance problems, but perhaps it would be possible to have a process which pushed changes from the database into an SVN working copy and vice versa? Where would be good places to start looking at the code from this point of view? I also need to include a JavaCC-based wiki-to-html parser that we have as an option, but I'm betting that's an easier task? Thanks, best, Hamish -- Prof. Hamish Cunningham Department of Computer Science University of Sheffield Regent Court 211 Portobello St. Sheffield S1 4DP United Kingdom http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish/