Main changes:
== texvc accepts more TeX ==
== texvc_test for mass tests ==
Tested on corpus of TeX equations downloaded and perl-extracted
from PlanetMath, and it accepts 3553 of 6302.
Two things to consider about this numbers:
* These "equations" were extracted by very primitive regular
expression (/\$([^$]+)\$/), and many of them aren't really equations.
* lot of those that are use features predefined in prefaces
of particular articles.
It would really help if I could get real TeX sources of PlanetMath somehow.
Any idea ?
== HTML rendering engine is more powerful ==
It can render fractions now, like that one:
<math>\sum^{N+M}_{k=0} k^6 + \frac{\sum_{i=1}^M i}{\prod_{j=1}^N j}</math>
What is transformed into acceptably-looking but impossible to write by hand
code like that:
<table><tr align=center valign=bottom><td>N+M<td><td><table><tr align=center valign=bottom>
<td>M<td></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∑</font><td>i</tr><tr align=center valign=top>
<td>i=1<td></tr></table></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∑</font><td>k<sup>6</sup>+<td>
<hr style="{background: black}"></tr><tr align=center valign=top><td>k=0<td><td><table>
<tr align=center valign=bottom><td>N<td></tr><tr align=center><td><font size=+2>∏</font>
<td>j</tr><tr align=center valign=top><td>j=1<td></tr></table></tr></table>
Thanks, Brion. That will be very helpful for sysops who are undoing vandalism. Will it also let you enter a comment?
There's always a chance that a page deletion or "Hi, mom!" message is more of a newbie experiment than deliberate damage.
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion@pobox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 2:38 AM
To: wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback
I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
recent revision by an author other than the most current.
It's basically just a shortcut for page->history->old revision->
edit->save, not a new functionality, but rather handy if you've got to
do more than a couple at a time.
(See changes to Article.php; slighter to Language.php, wiki.phtml,
SpecialContributions.php)
I've also put the current CVS revision of everything as of a few hours
ago onto all the languages, so we should be running consistent.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Here is newest version.
* It allows configuring directories from LocalSettings.php,
* It has nicer support for log-like functions (for example
<math>e ^ \sin \alpha</math> is allowed now, it would
be error in real TeX)
* It contains a TODO file containing list of all things that
should be done before texvc is ready to be used on Wikipedias
(copy&paste from my previous emails mostly).
Recently, the messages to go from a discussion page to the corresponding
page have been changed to get "view user page", "view meta page" etcetera.
It's a nice change, but I now notice that the same has been done on the
non-English Wikipedias too. And that's not nice. I'd rather have a reasonable
text in Dutch than a better one in English on the Dutch Wikipedia. Could this
change thus please be rolled back except for en and meta?
Andre Engels
I often protect a page, before I undo damage to it.
Before reading this thread, my motivation for protecting a damaged page was just to keep the vandal (or newbie experimenter) from mangling the page further. But now I realize that, serendipitously, it also would stop non-sysops from wasting their time duplicating my work.
After I've protected and fixed a number of damaged pages, I then decide whether to label the person responsible a "vandal" or not. If I decide they're a vandal, I block their IP. Then I unprotect all the pages.
Ed Poor
Main changes:
* functions with optional parameter, like \sqrt[n] m vs. \sqrt m
* \mbox {foo}, now ASCII-only, but it will have to support Unicode in future.
Main changes:
* MD5 is stored in binary in database now, so MySQL has easier life
* Everything produced by renderMath is protected from further evaluation
Mechanism for doing that is ugly as hell (it's almost the same as one used
by <nowiki>)
* texvc is compiled to native code by default now. It probably won't make much
difference in terms of speed, as it's latex dvips and convert who take
most resources, but its free gaim, so why not use it (well, we could
also consider stripping texvc binary to make it a bit smaller, or doing some
really obscure optimalizations, but texvc is really not a performance
bottleneck).
Open questions:
* How to put TeX in safe mode ?
* Did you really measure that dir/a/ab/abcdef012345678.png is significantly
faster than dir/abcdef012345678.png and I should make math mode use this
trick too or you were just guessing and I can ignore that ?
Main changes:
* diff against newer version of CVS
* Failure message localized
* configurable temporary directory
* temporary file names prefixed by pid, so two texvc generating the same
image won't clash
Code is gradually getting closer to production quality.
Everything seems more or less normal now, but I'm going to leave
MaxClients down around 100 for a little while, just to see how it
goes. In an hour or two, if all is well, I'll set it back up to 150.
150 is the default, and generally not the best choice in my
experience. On Bomis, we usually set it much higher, but only after a
fair amount of experimenting with memory usage, etc. Possibly the 150
clients setting is a performance bottleneck on most days.
--Jimbo