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internal package Foswiki::Store::PlainFile is a Foswiki::Store

Single-file implementation of Foswiki::Store that uses normal files in a standard directory structure to store versions.

• Webs map to directories; webs only "exist" if they contain a WebPreferences topic.
• Latest revs for topics are in data/.../TopicName.txt. If there is no .txt for a topic, the topic does not exist, even if there is a history.
• Topic histories are in data/.../TopicName,pfv/
  • Each rev of the topic has a numbered file containing the text of that rev (1 2 .. N), each with a corresponding metafile 1.m 2.m .. N.m
• Latest attachments are in pub/.../TopicName/attach.ment
  • Attachment histories are in data/.../topic,pfv/ATTACHMENTS/attach.ment/
  • Same as a topic, each rev of an attachment has a numbered file containing the data for that rev, each with a corresponding metafile N.m
  • The latest rev of an attachment always has a history file (note: this means that all attachments are stored at least twice; same as in the RCS stores)
• 'date' always comes from the file modification date
• 'author' and 'comment' come from the metafile
• 'version' comes from the name of the version file

Note that .m metafiles currently only contain the CUID of the contributor. Other metadata is stored embedded in topic text.

A note on character encodings. This store is designed to work best when data is stored using UTF-8, but you can also use an alternate encoding by setting {Store}{Encoding}. Conversion to/from the alternate encoding is done at the lowest possible level - before calling file-level operations.

NOTE: Perl's low-level file operations treat file names as sequences of bytes. When a function such as 'open' is called and is passed a unicode string, 'open' interprets that string as a string of bytes. As such it is not strictly necessary to change the encoding of strings passed to these low-level functions unless {Store}{Encoding} is set to something other than 'utf-8'.