[Moin-user] Why oh why!

[Pierre Coupard]

Hey, thanks everybody for your replies. I apologize if the tone of my 
message sounded nasty or ungrateful, I must admit I had a bout of 
despair when I wrote it.

To address the points you have made: I had backed up the data before 
trying the upgrade, so I wasn't in any danger of permanently losing 
anything. But I wasn't too happy about downgrading back to 1.5.3.

As far as documentation is concerned, the Debian package is quite devoid 
of it, as are most Debian packages. I did however try to do my homework 
and found a lot of information on the net, most of it quite diluted and 
unhelpful (to me) . I'm afraid the first time I read something useful 
about the upgrading process is when I read your responses on this forum.

I ended up making a quick awk script to fix the pages for the new 
syntax, and fixing a few remaining things by hand. It was quicker for me 
to do this than to massage our data with multiple scripts.

I still think a "legacy" flag would be a good idea. Actually, what would 
be even better would be a "syntax version" variable. As someone firmly 
on the user side of MoinMoin, I reckon users should have the option of 
keeping things as they are (including not retraining people) : I'm a IT 
guy by accident, my real work is gun designer, so I really have no time 
to muck about with software. As for our MoinMoin users, they are 
gunsmiths in their 50s. The last thing you want with old geezer artisans 
who can barely check their email is ask them to learn a new wiki syntax. 
I couldn't care less if the new syntax is better, what I care about is 
disturbing these guys' habits as little as possible, as they get grumpy 
quite easily.

This isn't a reproach, I personally like the new MoinMoin syntax and I 
appreciate your efforts to make MoinMoin better, but in my particular 
reality with my users, the syntax change only brings me trouble. Having 
the option of using the latest MoinMoin but keeping the old syntax would 
be good.

I will stick with 1.7.1, I won't upgrade to 1.8. That's because it's the 
version in the Debian-testing package, and -testing is as cutting-edge a 
Debian distro as my production server is ever going to run. The 1.7 GUI 
window is no problem for me, I edit my pages in vi with the "It's all 
text!" Firefox add-on myself, and my users are used to it, so I won't 
rattle the nest again.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your answers, I won't panic next time :)

I just have one last question : I would like to use MoinMoin to keep 
track of daily tasks for the workers, and to keep track of machine 
maintenance schedules, etc... What I have in mind is using 
MonthCalendars to enter those things, and on the terminal PC in the 
workshop, have a cron job requesting the relevant date pages for the day 
from the wiki to print out reminders every morning. Do you think 
something like this already exist, or should I get coding?

Take care y'all.