Looking for a wiki-style, standalone, version-control-"safe" documenation package

Question

This may sound like it's not a programming related question, but stick with me here...

My team and I have found that documenting our project (a development platform w/ API) with a wiki is both useful to us and useful to the users. Due to some organizational issues, we're forced to do multi-site development without network connectivity. We've switched to a DVCS (Mercurial) and had great success with this. The wiki documentation proves to be a problem as the central site is setup with MediaWiki. The offsite people have no way to access or edit the wiki.

Is there any sort of wiki-style package which doesn't not require a server/database and will be useable in a DVCS environment?

Update: Should be open-source and cross-platform

Answer 1

DokuWiki stores all data in plain text files. You could install local web servers for every developer and use your VC system to sync between developers.

Answer 2

I can recommend TiddlyWiki. It does not need any web servers, only a browser, stores the entire Wiki documentation in a single HTML page. This can easily be shared through Mercurial.

Edit: Check this page, it discusses how to use TiddlyWiki with DVCS. It involves using an extension dubbed SynchroTiddly.

Answer 3

Perhaps you should look at auto-generation of documentation from source. This way, the documentation will automatically be version controlled.

A lot of generators support adding additional documentation via plain-text files which can be added to the repository.

Answer 4

ikiwiki: http://ikiwiki.info/ stores the info directly in the VCS (it supports mercurial as backend).

Answer 5

Look into Fossil it is a DVCS that contains a built in wiki and bug tracking system. This may be just what your looking for. Read the site, there is a built in webserver. You can use a CGI script to open up the connection to people (the fossil website is the fossil DVCS). After using it you may decide to move your code over to it as well. It is open source, and does have cross platform builds.

Answer 6

Ended up writing my own system using python,cherrpy, and mercurial. Perhaps one day it will end up open-source. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Answer 7

http://zim-wiki.org/
It's a desktop wiki (WYSIWYG editing, though not very sophisticated formatting) which stores everything in plain-text files. That means you can hold the files in version control, and have a friendly editing experience.

It even has builtin Bazaar support (commiting only currently).

^{[I know, late to the party - writing for benefit of others reading this question...]}

Answer 8

http://hatta-wiki.org/ is a wiki running on a Mercurial repository.

It's interesting to note how it handles conflicts: simultaneous edits are silently merged on commit, even if conflicting and committed with the conflict markers! That's OK because:

• it's text, not software
• you see the result of your edit immediately after commiting
• it treats conflict markers as valid wiki syntax (resulting in diff -u like highlighting of the conflict)!

This arrangement motivates you to edit again to resolve the conflict immediately - but doesn't force you to.