I have heard of the "tech-note" by reading this forum. Suddenly, I have some use for it. However, fossil help --everything shows it to be pretty much a WUI feature (web UI) [a], with no exposure at the CLI interface (that I can discern.)

[a. I assume that when, for /whatever commands, there are words about GET and POST traffic, but nothing about command line parameters, it is WUI-only. ]

A search of this forum shows some discussion of the feature, and there are tantalizing hints from "help --everything" that it is implemented. My rummaging around in the WUI has turned up nothing yet. (I've clicked on a great many parts of the timeline that look clickable, but I'm not sure what all is clickable.)

Is it a real feature? Is there some guidance re activating or using it? In the site or application help rather than in the code or forum dredging?

Wasn't the feature malfunctioning just recently? For that to happen, there must have been some usage, right?

I'm feeling kind of stupid about this, so there is no need to inform me of that.

Hi Larry,

Are you asking if technote is real? Yes, it is.

Help page: https://fossil-scm.org/home/help?cmd=/technote

It used to be called event.

Tech note example.

Tech notes are viewable in the timeline.

AFAIK, it's not accessible via cli. While there are many things you can do in the cli, you can't do everything, and that's on purpose. I think it would be painful to feed in a tech note in MD or fossil wiki format, hoping you get all formatting and layout correct.

AFAIK, it's not accessible via cli.

Technotes are essentially a special case of wiki pages and can be manipulated via the wiki command.

Good info!

This is another good case where cross-linking in the help pages could be helpful.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/help?cmd=/technote could link to https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/help/wiki

https://fossil-scm.org/home/help?cmd=/technote could link to https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/help/wiki

To do that we'd have to alias the /wiki and /technote pages/commands to be equivalent. The help index is created directly from the command/page dispatcher's contents, and has no facility for listing anything which isn't itself a command or page.

Sorry, I meant the "See also" section, such as in pull.

Sorry, I meant the "See also" section, such as in pull.

LOL! i didn't even know it could do that.

Thanks to Stephen and Sean both. It looks like I can proceed with those tips.

I think that "tech-note" needs an appearance in the permutated index and the keyword index. Maybe "technote" too. I suspect that my search was thrown off by getting the notion that "tech-note" was the feature's name. Even help --everything is helpful on this feature with a search for "technote". Silly me.

I can see how to view technotes from the UI, and now how to create one from the CLI using the 'wiki' subcommand. But creating one from the WUI has escaped my now somewhat better informed search. I may be back when that search has been thoroughly performed.

BTW, it is the tediousness of searching in a GUI or the WUI for deeply nested features that make 'help help --everything' a treasure. During my earlier search, I neglected to pull down every combo box. (I'm not used to such being used to navigate rather than selecting values. Now I know.)

Even if this seems a bit plaintive, I am appreciative too. Thanks again.

Stephan Beal (stephan) wrote on 2021-02-17 02:58:17:

Technotes are essentially a special case of wiki pages and can be manipulated via the wiki command.

I tried this:

fossil wiki create TestTechnote -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red

Which correctly creates an artifact recorded as a technote according to fossil timeline. However it isn't visible in the web timeline UI. I have selected "all" types to view, and used /timeline?y=e.

I tried adding -t TechnoteTagHere to the create command with no change.

What am I missing?

Dan Shearer

The previous example omitted the -t parameter. But I did use it in my tests :-)

I have never created a wiki page before, and I made various mistakes. Things I needed to get right before technotes appeared on the timeline:

• A remote repo and a local repo can have different web ui timeline defaults: my local fossil ui defaulted to "checkins" and the remote to "all types". I have no idea how this happened but it confused me for a little
• you need to use fossil sync to force the local repo to send technotes to the remote. You don't need to do this for tickets, and I assumed wiki pages would be like tickets
• one use of the -t switch is -t TECHNOTE-ID . I think TECHNOTE-ID is exclusively about editing an existing technote, and is an ordinary Fossil artefact id. It's not some other technote namespace one can curate.
• the main use of the -f switch is -t DATETIME, which is where to put the technote into the timeline. I have only successfully so far used a DATETIME of 'now'. I don't know where "now" fits in to Fossil time specifications

The following creates a technote:

fossil wiki create SomeTechnoteName -t now -M markdown --technote-bgcolor blue

This will prompt for input in the same way as fossil commit comments. Equally you can specify a filename at the end of the command.

Dan Shearer

You don't need to do this for tickets, and I assumed wiki pages would be like tickets

Sure you do. No part of the web interface automatically syncs with the remote. However, all "normally syncable" content - checkins, wiki, tickets, forum, etc. - are transferred via a single sync/pull/push.

I think TECHNOTE-ID is exclusively about editing an existing technote, and is an ordinary Fossil artefact id. It's not some other technote namespace one can curate.

That seems to be the case:

$ f wiki create X -t MyTechnote -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red
testing again
Created new tech note 2021-02-26 17:15:02.

i've never used the technote CLI interface, so can't comment on its quirks, but that certainly seems like a confusing one.

This will prompt for input in the same way as fossil commit comments. Equally you can specify a filename at the end of the command.

Or pipe from stdin. Or type it all on stdin and tap the EOF sequence when you're done (ctrl-D on most Unices).

fossil wiki create TestTechnote -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red

What am I missing?

i think that actually created a wiki page. To get a technote (if i'm reading the help right, noting (haha) that the technote feature was added by someone else):

fossil create -t DATETIME -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red

technotes are only named by a random ID or datetime, not a wiki-like name.

Trying your input:

$ f wiki create MyNote -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red
test test test
^D
Created new wiki page MyNote.

$ f wiki ls
MyNote

But this works:

$ f wiki create MyTechnote -t 2021-02-26T18:12 -M markdown --technote-bgcolor red
test test test
^D
Created new tech note 2021-02-26 18:12:00

$ f wiki ls
MyNote
$ f wiki ls -t
2021-02-26 18:12:00

The name given to create actually doesn't do anything for technotes (that they're silently accepted is arguably a bug):

$ f wiki export -t '2021-02-26 18:12:00'
test test test
$ f wiki export -t MyTechnote
technote [MyTechnote] not found

The three --technote-tags show up in the Fossil list of alltags, and they don't have any value assigned. But I have no idea what else can be done with them, if anything. I don't think they correspond in any way to tags in the sense of "branch", but I might be wrong.

Briefly on my way out the door again...

See the "Tags and Properties" section of https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/branching.wiki for the distinction between branches and non-branch tags. Tags normally don't have values in fossil but they are allowed to (and a few of the special case tags, like color, need a value). In the case of that command there's no way to set a value unless (perhaps - haven't checked the code) the command is looking for x=y and splitting on that '='. Any such value would be purely FYI - fossil couldn't do anything with it. (To be honest, i'm pleasantly surprised that it treated the 3 words as separate tags.)

Having a custom tag on a non-checkin isn't currently all that useful. Only checkins can generally make use of them (fossil update release-x.y), but improving upon that is one of the points in the GSoC list.

Thanks for this interesting thread. I'm learning a lot. Here's something implicit above but I didn't get it until thrashing around a bit, so here's making it explicit for those like me:

fossil wiki create TestNote -t now -M markdown ... does indeed create a technote, but TestNote becomes the Comment not the page Name. This is clear on the manual page, but I missed it (ref).

fossil timeline will show the TestNote comment (3rd line below) but wiki list will not (see next).

$ fsl timeline -t e 
=== 2023-03-14 ===
03:31:39 [1a976f9f5f] Add attachment [/artifact/dd1a2cc45c7fa113|atkinhub.css] to tech note [/technote/e2ddee1d84505d72|e2ddee1d84] (user: Matt)
03:26:25 [abbbf1df40] TnoteTest (user: Matt)
=== 2023-02-27 ===
04:41:16 [d021c3466c] testing tags on technotes (user: Matt tags: cms, meta)
03:22:41 [8e80baa320] TestTechnote2 (user: Matt tags: cms, meta)

fossil wiki list -t -s will show the date-time and the unique ID of technotes only.

$ fsl wiki list -t -s
e2ddee1d84505d72d15685d2bee1eff8ea6e7d35 2023-03-14 03:26:25
dadd7c893e9847b4600f81686b332f5659807269 2023-02-27 04:41:16
a89d807c0f28346c388a1bd8a75a4ee4e3e518d1 2023-02-27 03:22:41

Niggle: I don't understand yet why the ID shown for TnoteTest from timeline is abbbf1df40 while for wiki it's e2ddee1d..., but I've run out of time to explore tonight and I want to get this out before it escapes me.

So if you're mentally trying to track Technotes by their comment there's some homework to do, in matching up the date-time across the outputs, as that seems to be the only thing in common.

, with no exposure at the CLI interface (that I can discern.)

See the wiki command. It's primarily a UI feature, though.

Wasn't the feature malfunctioning just recently? For that to happen, there must have been some usage, right?

It wasn't actually being used at the time - a test run of libfossil's artifact parser uncovered the misbehavior.

That said, i use it as kind of a "dev diary" or "announcement" feature from time to time:

https://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/libfossil/timeline?y=e

Is there some guidance re activating or using it?

The wikihelp page can (with the correct access rights) be used to create technotes.

Ideally, the new wiki editor could be used to edit technotes, but i simply didn't consider that use for it when implementing it at the time, and now it's a low-priority TODO.