On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Heiko Nardmann heiko.nardmann@itechnical.de wrote:
Is it possible to have a version control system, e.g. Subversion or Git, as the backend for MediaWiki instead of a DBMS ?
Unlikely.
If not possible: is this due to data model mismatches or "just" missing man power to have it implemented?
MediaWiki assumes an SQL database backend, and breaking that assumption would require rewriting MediaWiki. However, certain things are abstracted and can be stored in different ways. Uploaded files are one example. The text of article revisions is also handled separately -- it can currently be stored separately from the rest of the database, and you only need to do primary-key lookups (I think), so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to write more backends for it. You've got to have *some* kind of SQL RDBMS for the bulk of the data, though, at least SQLite.
VCSes are normally not designed for concurrent writes, or multiple writes per second, so I'd expect scalability of any VCS backend to be nonexistent. But it should theoretically be possible to put article text in a VCS if you wanted to do some coding work, I'd think. I have no idea what you'd gain by doing so, however.