[Moin-user] Question about underlay pages in 1.9.3

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 5. February 2015 00.39.44 Joseph Kang wrote:
> Thanks for the reply, Paul. Your presumption is correct. I'm using the
> tar.gz distributions as downloaded from moinmo.in and I did perform a
> "moin maint cleancache" as part of the upgrade process.

Good. Sorry not to get back to you quickly about this, by the way!

> I happen to have a test machine that's a clone of the production system. I
> just deleted the underlay directory in my test wiki instance directory;
> copied /usr/share/moin/underlay into my wiki instance subdirectory; went
> through the process of installing the language packs all over again; and
> issued a "moin maint cleancache". The packs I chose were
> "all_system_pages", "all_help_pages", and "admin_pages". When I browse to
> this test instance and view the "HelpOnFormatting" page, it still shows
> the version that says the markup is "[[BR]]".
> 
> I did some digging in the file system and noticed that the
> "/usr/share/moin/<wiki-instance>/data/pages" subdirectory has the same
> directories that exists in "underlay" (with older file mod time/dates) in
> addition to the directories for our wiki's own content. I can only guess
> that it's pulling the outdated HelpOnFormatting page from there. As part
> of my upgrades, I always made sure I issued the "moin migration data"
> command. As far as I recall, I never saw any errors from them.

I don't remember when the underlay system was introduced, but I think I first 
encountered it having already been using Moin for a while, so perhaps your old 
version didn't employ the underlay for help pages and had them all installed 
in the pages directory. I see that Moin 1.3 featured the underlay, at least:

https://moinmo.in/MoinMoinRelease1.3

Why the pages didn't have their markup converted is a mystery to me, however.

> Should the pages that are in "underlay" also exist in "data"? Or is that an
> artifact from running a really old version of MoinMoin and migrating it to
> newer versions?

They only get replicated in the pages directory if they are edited, I think.

> It may be helpful to provide the full list of versions I upgraded
> to/through: 1.187 (as shown on the page footer with "show_version=1" set
> in wikiconfig.py), 1.3.5, 1.5.3, 1.5.9, 1.6.0, and finally 1.9.3
> 
> Thanks again for your time and assistance. (Sorry about the top reply vs.
> inline. Stuck using Outlook.)

It's probably safe to try running without the duplicated help pages residing 
in the pages directory. Perhaps moving one of the page directories 
(pages/HelpOnFormatting, for example) out of the Moin installation to 
somewhere temporary, then possibly cleaning the Moin cache, and finally 
reloading the page in the browser might provide an insight into what is 
happening.

Paul