[Moin-user] moin 1.9 - new deployment and new docs

[Thomas Waldmann]

> Just curious, what features are planned for Moin 1.9?

In 1.9 we integrate the Summer of Code 2008 project of Florian Krupicka
(mentor: Armin Ronacher), which was about refactoring the moin core to
be a WSGI application (see http://wsgi.org/ ).

The new code replaces the previous request.* and server.* packages
within moin and the server adaptor scripts (all that existed to support
different types of servers like cgi, fastcgi, mod_python, twisted, ...)
with a core that just talks WSGI.

This will simplify maintenance and debugging of the moin code, because
everyone will (as far as moin is concerned) use the same WSGI code.

Some (python) servers meanwhile directly speak WSGI to python web apps,
some other servers (like apache) have wsgi support modules (mod_wsgi is
really great).

Other servers that do not (yet) support WSGI, will be supported by some
3rd party code we bundle with moin (flup and wsgiref code will support
cgi, fastcgi, scgi (new), ajp (new) and standalone).

mod_python support was dropped (it was a constant source of troubles and
no moin developer used it, so we are rather relieved about not having to
support it any more). For apache users mod_wsgi is a great replacement
of mod_python, that works far better, more secure and more comfortable.

Twisted support: we currently have nothing special for Twisted in moin
1.9. Maybe someone from the Twisted community can help us with this if
they need more than a moin WSGI app. I guess it could be done as a
generic Twisted -> WSGI middleware as flup does it for other servers.

Other servers: there is lots of activity in the python world to support
WSGI. So if you don't see your server supported (and you also don't want
to run CGI, that should work for every server), just browse through the
wsgi.org site and use google - maybe someone already has written some
nice middleware.

Docs: as you can imagine, the install docs need major changes due to
this. I already killed all old (en and de) install docs and server
specifics from the master19 wiki. They soon will be replaced by new
docs.

In the new docs, there will be some fundamental changes:
 * we will concrentrate on documenting moin (not web server
configuration, not server administration, not generic operating system
usage)
 * we will broadly document one kind of "easy, 5mins installation" of
moin - this is for desktop users, users in a hurry, moin newbies and for
users without (web) server admin knowledge. We already have that for
Linux, still searching someone doing it for Windows and Mac OS X.
 * for all other "server class" stuff, we will require server admin
knowledge and that for stuff like Linux, Apache, lighttpd, mod_wsgi,
flup, etc. you will just have to read THEIR docs. We'll briefly describe
the moin specifics and requirements.

We hope that we get some support from the moin community with testing
and improving of the new docs, so that users will be more satisfied with
our docs in future.

Language maintainers that did not yet remove the old install docs:
please do so (see the english pages).