When I added or edited a page, no commit message was written out (Mercurial backend, though I guess it shouldn't matter). This was done for e.g. the rename plugin. I made a naive but seemingly working change to editpage.pm to add a message.

I modeled the message on rename.pm, which used a lowercase initial letter and imperative form of the verb. This is not the case for e.g. the comment plugin, which says "Added a comment: ", so I guess there is no strict rule on style in this case.

Diff follows. --Daniel Andersson

This is somewhat intentional. It's pretty usual for changes to be made to a wiki without bothering to say what changed; the change speaks for itself and it would just be clutter to mention what file was changed, since any reasonable interface will show the filename, or a link, or some summary of what files were affected when showing a change.

I use the Mercurial backend, and Mercurial doesn't allow empty commit messages, so if there were no message, it would default to "no message given" (hardcoded in mercurial.pm), which is also clutter, and non-descriptive at that. But I'm on board with your reasoning. It's a matter of taste (and somewhat backend), I guess. I might continue to locally use this patch (with the caveat below fixed when commit message is given), but I won't push for it to be included upstream. --Daniel Andersson

Hmm.. It would be possible to make the mercurial backend include the filename (or just "added" or "edited") in the commit message. It might take some work, especially to handle rcs_commit_staged, since it would probably need to cache what files have been staged for commit. --Joey

Also your patch stomps over any commit message that the user does provide, so certianly cannot be applied as-is. --Joey

Yes, "naive" was the word . --Daniel Andersson

---

diff -r ee177ca9bf36 Plugin/editpage.pm
--- a/Plugin/editpage.pm    Fri Jul 15 17:58:04 2011 +0200
+++ b/Plugin/editpage.pm    Sat Jul 16 03:01:13 2011 +0200
@@ -405,6 +405,10 @@
        if ($config{rcs}) {
            if (! $exists) {
                rcs_add($file);
+               $message = "add $file";
+           }
+           else {
+               $message = "edit $file";
            }

            # Prevent deadlock with post-commit hook by