Item2601: Missing useless 'title' attribute in META:PREFERENCE takes foswiki down

Way back when META:PREFERENCE was invented, it had three attributes: name, value and title. I have searched and searched, but can't find any documentation or explanation of the title attribute. But if it is missing, it crashes Foswiki in the preferences parser.

When META:PREFERENCEs are parsed, the title attribute has PREFERENCE_ prepended, and is added to the preferences DB. The name attribute is added to the DB as-is. So, if we have a setting such as:

• Set SNOW = white

then expressed as a META:PREFERENCE this is %META:PREFERENCE{name="SNOW" value="white"}%. When this preference is loaded, we end up with two preferences, the equivalent of:

• Set SNOW = white
• Set PREFERENCE_SNOW = white

As far as I can tell this is pointless. But if the title attribute is missing, the parse fails in flames.

trunk already has this fixed by testing whether title is defined or not. Release branch needs the fix too. And MirrorWebPlugin must generate the title attribute, to be compatible with old releases.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 06 Jan 2010

Since the next release is coming from trunk, I'm marking this as ready for 1.1.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 16 Mar 2010