[Mailman-Developers] Wiki Migration Update

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday 16 June 2013 17:43:48 Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Jun 15, 2013, at 09:09 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:
> >
> >http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/
>
> It's looking great Paul.  I really appreciate your continued efforts here.
> I'd like to hear especially from Mark and the other top wiki editors what
> they think is still necessary before we can pull off the migration.  We all
> know it won't be perfect, but I think it has to be just good enough that a
> manual cleanup is tractable.  A migration would provide a good opportunity
> to do some much needed gardening. ;)

Indeed. Thanks for the feedback!

> Here are some of my thoughts:
>
> * Once we migrate we can probably get rid of the spaces.  I think that's a
>   Confluence-ism that doesn't translate as well to Moin.  That should be
> easy enough to do manually, right?

The only apparent purpose of the spaces is to separate the content and to 
prevent name collisions, but I'm not sure there are any such collisions. 
Maybe I can check this.

> * We'll want a moderate amount of theming to be more consistent with the
> web site, but the latter also is in dire need of an update.
>
> * The top link on the FAQ page doesn't work.
>   http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/DOC/Frequently%20Asked%20Questions

Yes, that page has a name ending in a question mark, and the way I host this 
publicly doesn't like that. It's a bug in mod_rewrite, and if I host it on my 
own local Apache instance with full control over the configuration, I don't 
get this problem. It will go away in future, I promise. :-)

Actually, I could have changed the page title generation to remove trailing 
question marks for this exercise; I already shorten page names where the 
filesystem would otherwise be upset (Moin needing to use the page names when 
storing pages).

> * Only the FAQ 4 page has sub-FAQ numbers.  (BTW, do you know of any Moin
>   feature to make creating and managing a FAQ nicer?)

I'm sorry but I don't quite follow the first sentence here. All of the pages 
should show a list of questions in their respective section, but I see that 
only section 4 has numbered pages. Is that what you meant? The page names I 
take straight from Confluence, and you can see the same phenomenon in the 
existing wiki:

http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions

Of other Moin sites providing FAQs, I can think of the Mercurial Wiki:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/FAQ

Here, they use the Include macro to bring in subpages providing each section, 
and the Moin TableOfContents macro is smart enough to see all the included 
content and make a huge TOC. They could go further and also provide edit 
links when including content: then, if anyone wanted to edit a section or a 
question, they would be able to find the link for the subpage and do so; 
editing the main page only really permits editing of the Include macros and 
little else, as seen in the raw text of the page:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/FAQ?action=raw

As you can see from the existing translation of the Mailman Wiki, it's 
possible to include many pages without having to name them all; take a look 
at the last line of the following, which is used to drag in all the comments 
on the page:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/COM/Home?action=raw

The ordering seems to be fixed on the page names concerned, however, making it 
somewhat awkward if you prefer a different ordering, but we could always 
provide a variant of the Include macro that supported other ordering 
capabilities, I imagine.

> * How will we control wiki spam on the new site?  Right now, we allow
> anyone to sign up and read, but they must request write access.  When they
> do, we add their userid to a special group that has write to any wiki page
> (except the currently unused private pages).  Can we have the same setup
> for Moin? I think it's *probably* okay to just have people re-request write
> access after a migration (no need to automate the user/group migration I
> think).

Moin is very flexible about access control, so we can almost certainly support 
what is needed. As for registration, I think there are extensions that 
require people to verify themselves using e-mail - the Debian Wiki may be 
using this, I think - and it's probably completely feasible to support this 
kind of mechanism.

As for migration, I haven't looked into this, but I don't see too many 
problems at least replicating the Confluence accounts, even if we can't 
migrate all the details.

(I think it's interesting to consider issues of authentication, and 
coincidentally with respect to the Summer of Code work, I've been playing 
with PGP-signed/encrypted interactions with Moin. So I look forward to seeing 
what people come up with around such interactions with Mailman.)

> It seems to me the Moin wiki is pretty darn close.  If Mark and others
> agree, I can start the ball rolling to request the necessary resources and
> DNS shuffles.

My main concern is that I've missed some weird markup behaviour and that we 
end up with pages where the markup is completely wrong throughout the history 
of the page (both Confluence markup and the XHTML variant that Confluence 4 
and later use). But I'd like to think that I'm reaching the second half of 
the exercise at the very least. ;-)

Paul

P.S. I can perhaps regenerate the site to work around the question mark issue, 
if you want. Then, all of the content should be navigable.