Prompting for an edit summary in TRAMP?

[Tim Landscheidt]

Hi,

mediawiki-mode (cf. https://launchpad.net/mediawiki-el) com-
bines wiki syntax highlighting and reading/creating/editing
MediaWiki pages.

At the moment, this combination makes it more complicated
for example to edit JavaScript files on wikis or directly
export org-mode agendas there.

The simple solution would be to separate the syntax high-
lighting and the remote editing parts, for example by moving
the latter to TRAMP (who would have thought? :-)).

But MediaWiki requires (or at least most wikis strongly en-
courages) edit summaries (one line "commit messages").  How-
ever, MediaWiki certainly is way too simple to warrant
vc-mediawiki.el and doesn't fit its model at all.

So I would have to query the user for the edit summary on
TRAMP file save while still retaining the possibility to au-
tomate this (for example, if I had a function that would ex-
port my org-mode agenda to a wiki, I would not want to be
bothered every time to enter "Update.").

Are there precedents in TRAMP for querying the user in such
cases?

My gut suggests having a variable
tramp-mediawiki-edit-summary which is taken as the edit sum-
mary if it is not nil, and otherwise prompt the user.  In
scripts, one could then wrap save-buffer calls & Co. in a
let form.

Tim