Re: [RFC/PATCH] Added a remote helper to interact with mediawiki, pull & clone handled

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Overall, it's looking pretty good. I like that I can resume a
half-finished import via "git fetch". Though I do have one complaint:
running "git fetch" fetches the metainfo for every revision of every
page, just as it does for an initial clone. Is there something in the
mediawiki API to say "show me revisions since N" (where N would be the
mediawiki revision of the tip of what we imported)?

The idea is that we ultimately want to be able to import a subset of a
large wiki. In Wikipedia, for example, "show me revisions since N" will
be very large after a few minutes. OTOH, "show me revisions touching the
few pages I'm following" should be fast. And at least, it's O(imported
wiki size), not O(complete wiki size)

Ideally, there could be heuristics like

"show me how many revisions since N"
if (not many) {
    "OK, show me them all in details"
} else {
    "hmm, we'll do it another way, show me revisions touching my pages"
}

but let's not be too ambitious for now: it's a student's project,
completing one week from now, and the goal is to have something clean
and extensible. Bells and whistles will come later ;-).

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/