DanBrehmer
About Me
I am trained as a physicist and work at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory.
I found PmWiki a few years ago when I was looking for a way to capture knowledge and centralize documentation for the beam lines here at SSRL. I have still not recruited many people to add to our wiki - XrayWiki, but two other groups are starting their own wikis using PmWiki. One of those will be a field in the wikifarm on our VMS machine, which is where the XrayWiki runs.
PmWiki on VMS
XrayWiki runs on a VMS machine. This requires a little extra configuration effort, but is relatively easy. I was recently contacted by another person setting up PmWiki on VMS and I sent him the following advice.
The one thing that you will have to edit in pmwiki.php is the naming of the wiki.d and wikilib.d directories. VMS will not like the . In the directory name so change all references in pmwiki.php from wiki[lib].d to wiki[lib].
In the config.php file, which should be placed in the local directory, we have the following set
umask(0);
$ForceMkdir=1;
$EnablePathInfo = 0;
$SysDiffCmd = 'gdiff';
$SysPatchCmd = 'gpatch --silent';
You may be using a different diff program.
If something is going wrong check the notes in the config file for using
the switch,
$EnableDiag=1;
Which may be of some help. Patrick will ask you to turn this on also if
you ask for help on the list.
One other thing that I remember we had to turn on... Alan probably remembers better than I do... That is session information? I forget what that is exactly, but we needed to enable it.
Finally, when transferring files to your VMS machine be sure to use ASCII as the transfer method for the text files, except for the .tmpl files... For some reason when these are sent as ASCII strange characters are produced in the web page output. These are files found in the pub/skins directory.
One small problem that I have not addressed is that VMS never overwrites anything, it just creates a new version up to a maximum of 32 thousand something. This causes a problem with the .flock file, in the wiki and wikilib directories, which is updated every time a page is accessed. This is a problem if you have a busy site because it will keep creating new versions up to the limit at which time your site will stop working. So, you may want to disable the line in pmwiki.php that refers to .flock. Of course it will probably also be a problem on a busy site not to have locking, and locking with a .flock file probably doesn't work properly with VMS anyway due to the versioning. So if there is enough need among VMS PmWiki users we may want to look for a better solution.