MVS(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation MVS(1)NAMEmvs - A command line Mediawiki client
SYNOPSISmvs [Options] command [Options] [filename]
mvs -h|--help
mvs--version
mvs-D
mkdir wikistuff
cd wikistuff
mvs [-q|-v] login [-T] [-d <wikihost>] [-l language_code ] [-u <username>] [-p <password> ] [-w <wiki_path>]
mvs [-q|-v] update [<file> ..]
mvs [-q|-v] up [<file> ..]
mvs [-q|-v] commit [-M] [-W] -m "commit message" <file>
mvs [-q|-v] com [-M] [-W] -m "commit message" <file>
mvs [-q|-v] preview [-M] [-W] [-m "commit message"] <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.
Note:Users of "mvs" from before version 0.27 will notice that in this
documentation the options are mostly listed after the "mvs" sub-
command. This makes "mvs" behave more like "cvs", "svn", or "tla", and
so should make it easier for people who are used to using those
programs. If you prefer to use "mvs" the old way, that will still
work, at least for the next few versions.
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 established the account.
Step 2: Create a working directory
"mvs" 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 hostname for the Mediawiki site
to which you want to contribute.
www.wikitravel.org
Now use the host with your username and password to login.
mvs login -d www.wikitravel.org -u <username> -p 'secret'
If "mvs" knows about your Mediawiki host it will set set the
"wiki_path" to the correct default for that server. In this case it
will also be able to select the language version of that Wiki for you
if you specify a "language_code":
mvs login -d www.wikitravel.org -l fr -u <username> -p 'secret'
The code must match the one which your wiki host uses for a given
language, and of course the language version must exist for the given
host.
If your Mediawiki install uses a nonstandard path to the wiki script
you can specify it on login. The path to the wiki script is the part
of the URL after the host name, and before the '?':
mvs login \
-d www.wikitravel.org \
-u <username> \
-p 'secret' \
-w 'mw/wiki.phtml'
You can change the edit and action paths in the created .mediawiki file
after successful login accordingly.
Now anything you submit to the Mediawiki server will be credited to
user "<username>".
NOTE: If you have been using an earlier version of "mvs" you should
probably delete the .mediawiki file in your working directory.
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 commit -m 'commit message' 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, i.e. 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 conflicts
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 relevant "Talk:"
page to try to work out an agreement with the other contributor in
cases where you just simply disagree.
Repeat
You can continue editing and committing 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.
CHARACTER ENCODING
All of your ".wiki" files should be stored with UTF-8 encoding. Upon
login to a given server mvs will determine the encoding used by that
server, and will upload in that encoding only. For servers using
non-UTF-8 character sets you should use HTML entities for any character
you want to represent which is outside of the server's character set.
This includes the english Wikipedia. Most newer Mediawiki sites
however do use UTF-8, on these sites HTML entities are never needed.
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" all
"commit"s 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
corresponding 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 different syntax:
********************Start of conflict 1 Insert to Primary, Insert to Secondary ************************************************************
The line as it appears on the server
****************************************************************************************************
The line as it appears locally
********************End of conflict 1********************************************************************************
"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:
= (Unchanged)
The file is the same as the page on the server.
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.
? (Unknown)
Neither the file, nor a corresponding server page exist.
commit
Commits any changes in the specified local file 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. Nothing will be
comitted if the file and server version are identical.
When running "mvs commit" you must use the "-m" flag to send a
commit message to the Mediawiki server. e.g.:
mvs commit -m 'Added Hotel Eldorado' Paris.wiki
preview
This command functions identically to "mvs commit", except that
nothing is actually committed. Instead, the file is uploaded and
the Mediawiki server sends back a formatted preview. The "-m" flag
is optional. If you set the MVS_BROWSER environmental variable to
the path and filename of your favorite browser, mvs will launch it
with the preview page.
clean
This command removes any local version reference files relating to
pages you've deleted.
rm Paris.wiki
mvs clean
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.
-D
Print information about known Mediawiki servers, then exit.
-q
Causes the command to be quiet. Informational messages are suppressed.
-u "<username>"
Specifies a username for "mvs login".
-p "<password>"
Specifies a password for "mvs login".
-l "<language_code>"
The language code the wiki server uses to differentiate between
language versions.
-m "<your message>"
A commit message for "mvs commit". Use this to explain the nature of
your changes.
-s "<your message>"
Same as "-m"
--minor <yes|no|default>
Choose whether to mark change as a minor edit. The default is to mark
changes as minor if the Mediawiki user profile is set to do so by
default. Use this when committing a change with "mvs commit" or
previewing with "mvs preview".
-M
Same as "--minor yes".
--watch <yes|no|keep|default>
Choose whether to add the edited page to your watchlist. Specifying
"keep" will maintain the current watched status. The default is to
watch the page if it is already being watched, or if the Mediawiki user
profile is set to do so by default. Use this when committing a change
with "mvs commit" or previewing with "mvs preview".
-W
Same as "--watch yes".
-w "<wiki path>"
The path on the given "host" to the Mediawiki script. This defaults to
wiki/wiki.phtml which is correct for a vanilla install of Mediawiki
1.4.x.
-v
Verbose. If this is set "mvs" will give you lots of extra information
about what it's doing. The -q flag overrides this.
ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABLES
MVS_BROWSER
The browser you prefer to use for previewing changes.
HTTP_PROXY
A proxy server to use (if any), expressed as a standard URL, something
like this:
export HTTP_PROXY=http://[username:password@]proxy.myorg.org:8080
CAVEATS
This is an early version of this program. Future versions may have
major differences which will effect your ability to use them
interchangeably with this one. In particular the initial "command"
arguments may become options and the handling of conflicts might change
dramatically.
BUGS
Please submit bug reports to the CPAN bug tracker at
<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=WWW-Mediawiki-Client>.
DISCUSSION
There is a discussion list. You can subscribe or read the archives at:
<http://www.geekhive.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/www-mediawiki-client-l>
SEE ALSO
Mediawiki
<http://www.wikimedia.org|Mediawiki>
CVS
http://www.cvs.org
AUTHORS
Mark Jaroski <mark@geekhive.net>
Bernhard Kaindl <bkaindl@ffii.org>
Improved error and usage messages.
Oleg Alexandrov <aoleg@math.ucla.edu>, Thomas Widmann
<twid@bibulus.org>
Bug reports and feedback.
Adrian Irving-Beer <wisq@wisq.net>
Preview support, export support for multi-page update, more 'minor'
and 'watch' settings, and bug reports.
COPYRIGHT
X Copyright 2004-2005, Mark Jaroski
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
POD ERRORS
Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained
below:
Around line 517:
You forgot a '=back' before '=head2'
Around line 633:
alternative text 'http://www.cvs.org' contains non-escaped | or /
Around line 637:
'=item' outside of any '=over'
Around line 652:
You forgot a '=back' before '=head1'
Around line 654:
Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in 'X'. Assuming
ISO8859-1
perl v5.20.2 2006-06-11 MVS(1)
