Include remote files

It was asked if it would be possible to include (possibly remote) files at markup level, something like:

[[include file.txt]]

This idea of external resources embedded at markup level is bad because it just goes against the whole amusewiki architecture, which tries and keep the archive as a whole and the texts as self-contained units.

However, the problem is fixable in another way, which looks saner and more secure (because of course, this feature would open up a whole set of vulnerabilities: think e.g. about an URL as http://localhost/path/which/is/supposed/to/be/served/only/to/localhost which could be possibly get embedded on a public wiki).

Instead, you could have a script which does the following:

Read a user provided file with an identifier and an URL. Which at this point could be very well file:///etc/passwd as it's under the user control and out of the app.

In the muse file, leave some comments, like ; START INCLUDE file and ; STOP INCLUDE (which are invisible in the generated formats)

Fetch the application git and do forced update to keep it in sync using the freshest version.

Scan the archive and replace with the content between the comments with the LWP->decoded_content stuff the script pulls from the identifiers, and commit the changes, if any. Bonus point: you actually keep track of the changes not just display the content at some random time. I see this as feature, of course.

Add a cronjob to the application which pulls this cloned git every hour or so. The applications will refuse to pull non-fast-forward anyway, so it's safe.

See script/sync-remote-archive.pl for an example of a script which automatically pulls the content from a remote archive.