(Many) Pull requests already merged are reverted by SDLWikiBot weeks later about sdlwiki

[icculus]

So this happens because the wikibot syncs between SDL's headers and wiki in a cronjob that runs once a minute. When it does, it copies differences in the headers to the wiki first, and if both have changes, the wiki changes are lost here.

Usually this works because commits don't generally happen to both the wiki and the headers in the same 60 second window.

BUT: the bot will also refuse to do anything if sync'ing doesn't produce reliable results, so it won't get into a situation where it's committing the same changes back and forth in an infinite loop. In this case, it won't do anything until I come along and unjam it manually...and now your 60 second window might be hours or days, and this is where we see it eating changes.

Redesigning to deal with this is probably significant effort, and I should do it at some point, but I wanted to explain why this happens for now.

[icculus]

We can sort through commits manually; basically it's just looking for the wikibot commits and seeing if a human commit right before it got vaporized.

I think the proper way to fix the issue going forward is to have the cronjob note the last timestamp it sync'd at, and then run wikiheaders.pl for each revision of both repos, back and forth, in chronological order, committing the final set of changes when it gets to present time.

That way, it'll work moment to moment, or if the cronjob goes down for a month.

[slouken]

Is there any way to recover the lost changes?