NAME

mvs - A command line Mediawiki client

SYNOPSIS

  mvs [Options] command [Options] [filename]

  mvs -h|--help
  mvs --version

  mkdir wikistuff
  cd wikistuff

  mvs [-q|-v] [-d <wikihost>] [-u <username>] [-p <password> ] login

  mvs [-q|-v] update [<file> ..]
  mvs [-q|-v] up [<file> ..]

  mvs [-q|-v] commit [<file> ..]
  mvs [-q|-v] com [<file> ..]

DESCRIPTION

mvs is a command line client whose purpose is to simplify offline editing of Wiki content. It allows you to get any number of pages from a given Mediawiki site, edit the pages with any editor, get and merge any concurrent updates of the pages, and then safely commit the users own changes back to the version of the page on the server.

The mvs commands which take a filename argument only accept a single filename as so to avoid taking up too much server bandwidth.

QUICKSTART

Step 1: Create an account on the Mediawiki server.

This should be done the normal way, by visiting the mediawiki website to which you want to contribute and creating a new account, setting the preferences, etc.

It should hopefully go without saying that you will want to become familiar with the editorial, usage, and copyright guidelines of the site. You should probably also make some contributions through the normal UI, and learn about following recent changes before contributing using mvs.

In addition for the sake of this test you should already have a user page like User:<username> with something on it, where <username> is the user name with which you estabilished the account.

Step 2: Create a working directory

Wix works with mediawiki formatted files with a .wiki extension and which are stored together with server information in a working directory. You will have to have at least one working directory for each Mediawiki site to which you contribute.

Simply use mkdir or the equivalent to make a new directory, and then before cd into that directory.

  mkdir wikitravel.en
  cd wikitravel.en

All of the operations below should be done from this directory.

Step 3: Login using mvs login

To use login you will need to know the site_url for the Mediawiki site to which you want to contribute. This will simply be the regular URL for the site, with any language path extension. For instance for the english version of Wikitravel I would use the site_url

  http://www.wikitravel.org/en

Now use the site_url with your username and password to login.

  mvs -d http://www.wikitravel.org/en -u <username> -p 'secret' login

Now anything you submit to the Mediawiki server will be credited to user "<username>".

Step 4: Use mvs update to fetch one or more working files

You can fetch existing material off of the site, or create new pages with mvs update, remembering that your files will need a .wiki extension:

  mvs update User:<username>.wiki User:<username>/Test_Page.wiki

This should produce the output:

  U User:<username>.wiki
  A User:<username>/Test_Page.wiki

The U (for Updated) means that User:<username> was found on the server and its contents inserted into the local files. The A (for Added) means that the User:<username>/Test_Page.wiki page does not yet exist on the server, and will be added when you run mvs commit.

Note that both of the pages we are working with are within your User Namespace. It's probably a good idea to restrict yourself to working with such pages while you are experimenting with mvs

Step 5: Edit the files to make corrections and contributions

Use your favorite text editor to edit the files. You might want to check out this page to see if there is a Mediawiki syntax highlighting file for your editor:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Syntax_highlighting

Of course if you don't find a highlighting file for you editor you are welcome to create one and submit it to the page above.

Step 6: Use mvs commit to submit your changes

When you are done editing a file and would like to submit your changes to the wiki server use mvs commit to do so:

  mvs -m 'commit message' commit User:<username>.wiki

Where 'commit message' is whatever you want to say about the changes you are submitting and why. You must provide a commit message or mvs commit will fail. You might also find that mvs commit fails complaining that the file has changed on the server. If this is the case you will need to use mvs update again to get the most recent changes.

Step 7: Update your wiki files

You can use mvs update again at any time to reconcile any of your files with the most recent changes from the server. Your changes will not be overwritten, but rather mvs will try to merge any server changes into the files as they exist in your working directory. Note that update and commit only work on one file at a time, as so to help prevent accidents and server congestion.

If for some reason there is a conflict, ie. you and someone else have made changes which appear to be incompatible, and cannot be resolved then your file will contain a conflict message, as detailed in the documentation for mvs update below. You must resolve any conficts before attempting to use mvs commit on the file. This is usually a very simple matter of choosing one version of the change or another. You should use your best judgement, consulting the relavant Talk: page to try to work out an aggreement with the other contributor in cases where you just simply disagree.

Repeat

You can continue editing and commiting changes with the files in your working directory. It might be a good idea for you to eventually create multiple working directories per site, perhaps grouping them by subject. This will work fine with mvs since it does not need to have a complete copy of all of the pages from a given server in a given working directory to work.

ARGUMENTS

Commands

The first argument after the options should be one of the following two commands:

mvs login

Allows the user to login to the Mediawiki server using an existing login and password for that server. After calling login ll commits from the same working directory will be logged as from the logged-in user.

mvs update

Updates the specified file[s] with content from the Mediawiki server. If a file does not exist it is created and populated with the current online version. If there is no online version, the file either created and left blank, or just left as it is. If there is content in both the specified file and in the cooresponding Wiki page, an attempt is made to merge the two, line by line. Files which are the same as the server version are ignored.

If no filenames are given on the command line, all visible files with the .wiki extension are processed.

Conflicting changes to a given line are detected on the basis of the date of the most recent update of the local file and date of the most recent change to the online Wiki page. If a line has changed in both the online page and the local file it is flagged as a conflict, as in CVS, but with a slightly differnt syntax:

  >>>>>> http://www.somewiki.org
  This is the version on the Wiki
  >>>>>> Paris.wiki
  This is the local version
  <<<<<<

mvs update reports the status of files which it touches to stderr with a letter indicating the file status, and then name of the file, again like CVS. The status letters are:

A (Added)

The file will become a new page on the wiki server.

M (Modified)

The file has been modified locally.

U (Updated)

The file has been updated with changes from the wiki server.

C (Conflicts)

The file contains conflict markers.

commit

Commits any changes in the specified local files to the Wiki site. A check is made first to make sure that there are no changes on the server more recent than the most recent update. Files which are the same as the server version are ignored.

If no filenames are given on the command line, all visible files with the .wiki extension are processed.

When running mvs commit you must use the -m flag to send a commit message to the Mediawiki server. eg:

  mvs -m 'Added Hotel Eldorado' commit Paris.wiki

File names

Any additional arguments are taken as local filenames to be processed. The local filename of a given Mediawiki page will be the same as its URL encoded name with the extension ".wiki". If no arguments are given then any filenames with the "wiki" extension and under the current directory are processed.

OPTIONS

-h

Display usage information.

-q

Causes the command to be quiet. Informational messages are suppressed.

-u

Specifies a username for mvs login.

-p

Specifies a password for mvs login.

-m

A commit message for mvs commit. Use this to explain the nature of your changes.

-e

The mediawiki edit path. For use with Mediawiki servers which have an altered path to a page's edit page.

-a

The mediawiki action path. For use with Mediawiki servers which have an altered path to a page's action page.

-l

The mediawiki login path. For use with Mediawiki servers which have an altered path to a page's login page.

CAVEATS

This is an early version of this program. Future versions may have major differences which will effect your ability to use them interchangably with this one. In particular the initial "command" arguments may become options and the handling of conflicts might change dramatically.

SEE ALSO

Mediawiki

http://www.wikimedia.org|Mediawiki

CVS

http://www.cvs.org

AUTHORS

Mark Jaroski <mark@geekhive.net>

COPYRIGHT

© Copyright 2004, Mark Jaroski

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

cpanm WWW::Mediawiki::Client

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install WWW::Mediawiki::Client