Can we talk about Relink for a second?
I’ve just frozen the current version of Relink to TiddlyWiki <=v5.3.8. There are too many finnicky changes to wikiparsing for me to put in the time making Relink compatible pre and post v5.4.0.
But since I’m doing that, it means Relink might take advantage of new TW mechanics. But I’ve got some questions about it. I don’t have time to upgrade Relink just yet, but I’m looking at the core code now, and it doesn’t look like it’s in good enough shape yet for a new and improved relink—the kind you all deserve.
“Core plugin to serialize syntax trees back to strings”
This would be great… if it’s done right. Relink goes to a lot of trouble making its own wikiparser hybrids because it could never rely on converting to a parse tree and back.
It’s looking like this feature is only good for when the parse tree is exactly the same as it was. I’m seeing a lot of “start” and “end” stuff. But those get pretty useless to me quickly if Relink needs to 1) swap out a title with one of a different length, 2) change quotation on some attribute, or 3) downgrade a wikilink into a transclusion or something like that. Everything will get offset.
Is tracking offset just something I’ll need to contend with?
It doesn’t look like the parse tree remembers the kinds of quotes used. When you guys are “reverting” parse trees back into text, are you changing all the quotes the user chose to use? Or are you looking at the offsets?
Bulkops has not changed in 4 years.
One thing people have always disliked about Relink is that it uses startup modules to inject new code into bulkops—the wikimethod module that introduces the core relinking behavior for tags and list.
Relink does this because there is no other mechanism to do so properly. So Relink will still be blasting parts of bulkops and making itself incompatible with any other plugins that might want to introduce their own renaming behavior independent of Relink.
Is this fine with everyone? Or do we want to update this?
\Define and $depth
These two “features” are the two reasons Relink can never truly be a 100% relink solution. \define makes the wikitext too unpredictable. And $depth makes it impossible to know where parameters are coming from, and thus if they should be relinked.
\define is an old dog whose served us well, and I also know it probably can’t be removed yet. But $depth… ohhh. I’ve got bones to pick with that attribute
I know @jeremyruston agreed to deprecate it, at least for the <$parameters> widget (<$slot> doesn’t have a better alternative yet). Can we do that? Can we remove this monstrosity? I stand by my assertion that no one is using it, because no one knows how. It’s a terrible antipattern.
Edit: Sorry to everyone I’m bothering by asking. I know a lot of these questions are ones I could answer myself if I dug into the source more, but I’m in the middle of an unrelated time-constrained project, and might not have time to really jump into Relink again until after v5.4 releases.
