default maxNumberOfVersionsToKeep to something sane instead of infinity

[vangheem]

I'm sure this can cause crazy bloat on long running plone site. Bad default value IMO.

[hvelarde]

what would be a good value? 5? 3?

[vangheem]

I was thinking 20.

[alecpm]

Is this a real problem for any actual sites? Versions are only saved when content is edited by hand TTW, regardless how long the site may have been running. I would think people might be surprised to find that they start losing data after a certain number of edits.

[vangheem]

Most real sites have a few pages that are edited quite often. Storing every version forever seems like a bad idea.

Couple that with content types that also store image or file data and you can start seeing some real large bloat.

[alecpm]

Seems like a bad idea and is causing real problems for actual sites are different things though. If we promise versioning, that comes with expectations, no? If this is causing problems for real sites, then it's probably not a bad idea to put a default limit here, but otherwise why break expectations?

[vangheem]

as an alternative, if we have disagreement here, perhaps it'd be good to have this setting more prominently in Site Setup somewhere?

[alecpm]

Surfacing it somewhere probably makes a lot of sense. There's no versioning control panel, but I'm sure there's a semi-reasonable place for it somewhere.

[hvelarde]

I think @alecpm has a point here: this should be a decision of the integrator.

in my case I can tell you it is causing real problems but only on a few objects; I'm watching right now the sites of 2 customers and I can see one case on each site with an object with a crazy number of versions:

• site 1: object X has 3159 versions and is 2221978014 bytes in size
• site 2: object Y has 4473 versions and is 4075292072 bytes in size

this seems to be pointing to a hidden bug.

@vangheem 👍 on having it on a more prominent place and better documented; we also need to have an easier way to remove old versions without having to run an external script like this one: http://stackoverflow.com/a/9684696/644075

[vangheem]

@hvelarde in your case, perhaps disabling versioning for c.cover by default is the way to go also.

[alecpm]

Wow, that's a lot of versions :-) That script just calls the beforeSaveHook, so you shouldn't need to use it except to purge all content at once rather than whenever a new version is saved.

[hvelarde]

@vangheem I can't; the user expects to use the check-out/check-in feature to modify the front page. if I disable versioning, the feature is lot.

@alecpm do you have a better script to purge any object versions above maxNumberOfVersionsToKeep?

[vangheem]

@hvelarde check-in/checkout-out is different from versioning. check-in/check-out comes from plone.app.iterate.

[alecpm]

You don't need a script, just saving the content with a new version should trigger the purge. To purge all existing content, you need a script, but once the setting is set you shouldn't need it going forward.

I think versioning may need to be enabled on the type for iterate to work, but you don't need to enable the auto-version on save for that.

[hvelarde]

yes, versioning is needed for check-in/check-out; I discovered that yesterday when the client called me because the feature disappeared after I disabled it 🌵