Re: [xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Extension Manager

How about having an entire site's state snapshotted as a release or branch (in subversion). You could then (1) fetch the next "site release tag", (2) xml-transform all markup, (3) build the associated xml documents, (4) create the package.xml manifest, (5) 'zip/jar' it up as a Xar, then (6) import via LargeXARImportScriptSnippet --- in "one-click" have the entire site (or staging server) upgraded to a new release.

One should also be able to go the other direction -- have an existing Xwiki site, and a Space.Doc>filename mapping so that an existing site/package/or/space can be snapshotted into subversion, and saved as a new branch. I would imagine the application manager would be the component which constructs the mappings from Space.Doc- > svn filename from the user's entries.

People preferring to edit in richer editing environments may prefer this because they can use their favorite syntax highlighting and built in revision-control integration. (i prefer xemacs and various extensions that allow it to save or load snapshots from a variety of revision control systems, including subversion ). By saving the non- Xml transformed HTML data into the revision control system, this becomes possible -- do all the transforms and packaging on-the-fly as part of the xar construction and importing process. One could use this approach to easily snapshot a release from a development server, move it to a production server, make any fixes to the current "branch" and when ready to release, snapshot that branch and move to the "live server." Finally, it wouldn't hurt to have an extra "backup" that sensibly snapshots the state of multiple xwiki subcomponents comprising a package or release. Often the "granularity" of changes saved in Xwiki's history (whch is great to have, I'm not complaining) is too "fine" -- especially if you're "rapid prototyping" ... and there's no way to specify that revision 743 of file #1 corresponds to revision 321 of file #2, called from #1.... Speaking of subversion... FYI, Karl Fogel's employment interview at Collabnet happened at my house in SF, back when I lived there and worked there (ca 2000 employee# < 10). My cat decided to get stuck on the neighbor's balcony immediately before the interview, and Karl found her loud meowling annoying enough that he interrupted the interview, climbed up the tree onto the 2ond story balcony (given the slope of the street, it was > 3 stories), and successfully rescued the cat, then completed the interview... He got the job, and I called the fire department to cancel the cat-rescue.... :-)

Niels http://nielsmayer.com On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Vincent Massol &lt;vincent(a)massol.net&gt; wrote: Note that I've also started putting ideas on http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/ApplicationManager It's not quite ready to be proposed officially yet (I'll send an email when it is) but if you don't agree with something listed already please let me know. Thanks -Vincent On Jun 20, 2009, at 12:03 PM, Vincent Massol wrote: ____________________________________