[ckan-dev] History pages

Fri Mar 8 14:45:14 UTC 2013

Hi everyone,

I'd like to discuss the history pages/ revisions pages in CKAN. 

We used to have history pages in CKAN and the pages still exist in the old templates [1]. With the new activity streams (i.e. [2]), we have a similar feature but in my opinion slightly different use cases. Also, we have the revisions [4] pages and .

I have apull request pending that replaces the old genshi templates with the new jinja templates at [3] for dataset history, group history, version differences and revisions. 

Now the question is how we integrate these into CKAN. As said before, we can say that these pages have been replaced by the activity streams. Another view on this is to say that both have their use cases and should both exist in CKAN. Sean suggested this is confusing because similar information is presented in multiple forms so he would not add the history to the dataset pages. He also suggested that the activity streams contain links to revisions so that one can see how a dataset looked at some point in the past. 

In my option, the activity streams offer a clean way to see what happened in the past but they to provide a way to see what has changed and how versions compare to each other. Especially in the case of groups the activity streams show what happened to the datasets in this group and not only what happened to the group itself. 

Okay, nuff input. The questions I would like to ask you are:

- Do we still want /revision and /revision/<REVISION>?
- Do we want /group/history/<GROUP> for group history?
- Do we want /dataset/history/<DATASET> for dataset history?
- Do we want /revision/diff/<STUFF> for comparing different revisions of a group or dataset?
- What are the advantages of activity streams over history pages? and vice versa?
- Should the activity stream link to the diff of a change instead of the latest version of a dataset/group?
- Is this email too long?

What are your opinions?

Cheers,
Dominik

[1] http://master.ckan.org/dataset/history/update-ppm-tb-dots-treatment-and-microscopic-centres-edo-state
[2] http://master.ckan.org/dataset/activity/update-ppm-tb-dots-treatment-and-microscopic-centres-edo-state
[3] https://github.com/okfn/ckan/pull/567
[4] http://master.ckan.org/revision