[Moin-user] A few upgrade questions

[Tim Bird]

Hi all,

I'm just putting the finishing touches on a big upgrade (from 1.0
to 1.6.3), and I have a few questions.

Most things have gone surprisingly well.  I have run LOTS of migration
scripts, and had to fix up a few things by hand.  But overall I
am very pleased with the results.  Documents and attachments are
mostly all in place, without too much trouble.

Here are a few issues I'm still trying to decide what to do about:

1. Use of HTML() macro.  I used this in only a few places.  It says
to be careful about it due to security.  How bad is it?  Should I avoid
it, and just work around the places I was using it.  (I'm rebuilding
the server due to it getting cracked. I don't think it was a MoinMoin
security breach, but I don't know for sure.  In any event, I'm being
much more cautious about security issues now.)
Any advice?

2. use of my own custom noprint processor block
I customized moin 1.0 so that it supported non-printable blocks.
That is, in normal web view, the block would be displayed as normal,
but in "print" view, the block would be hidden.  This was used for
online comments in a specification that could be edited online, but
then ultimately printed without the comments.  Online, the comments
appeared in a different color (green).

I modified parser/wiki.py for this, adding expressions for the
opening and closing of a 'noprint' block:
(?P<noprint>(\{\{\{#noprint))
(?P<noprint_close>(#noprint\}\}\}))
And also adding block parsing code, and functions to handle the block
depending on the mode:
     def _noprint_repl(self, word):
         return '<FONT COLOR="green">'

     def _noprint_close_repl(self, word):
         return '</FONT>'

Is there any feature like this already (that suppresses text depending
on the display mode), that I could transition to?

If not, would this be interesting enough to other people that I should work
up a patch against 1.6.3 and send it in?  I'm hesitant to continue using
a custom feature, because it makes upgrades a pain.

3. use of my own TableOfContents and Include macros.
I modified moin-1.0 to suppress my custom TableOfContents expansion in Included
documents, and to have my custom TableOfContents macro include the headings
of Included documents (adjusted for nesting level).  Does MoinMoin do this
now?  This was to support large documents constructed from several pages.

Any tips about newer features that could substitute for the above would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
  -- Tim



=============================
Tim Bird
Architecture Group Chair, CE Linux Forum
Senior Staff Engineer, Sony Corporation of America
=============================