[Mailman-Developers] Converting the Mailman wiki

[Bradley Dean]

Hi Barry and co.,

On 07/05/11 01:14, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> I'm part of the new group that John Sullivan of the FSF has brought together
>> to look at migrating the Mailman wiki from Confluence to MoinMoin.
>
> Excellent!

Though there's not much there at the moment you can see what we're up to 
here:

  https://gitorious.org/confluence2moinmoin

  https://gitorious.org/confluence2moinmoin/pages/Home

  http://lists.bjdean.id.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mmwiki

> The administrative interface does have options to download for backup an XML
> dump of the data.  There's currently a big red warning saying it's disabled
> "for security purposes", so I don't really know if it works, or what it gives
> you.  I'm certainly willing to give at least one member of your team
> administrative access, and we can verify with the hosting provider that you
> should be able to get the XML dump.  If that's not enough data to do the job,
> then we'll talk to the hosting provider about getting what you need.

If one of you has access to export the backup XML and send it through to 
me (or point me to a download URL if it's large) I would think that 
would be sufficient. We shouldn't need ongoing access to Confluence. I 
would expect that we could analyse the initial data dump, build and test 
the conversion process and then ask for one more export just before the 
switch-over.

On the other hand if you'd prefer us to make the export please set up an 
account for me and I'll see what I can do (I'm not familiar with 
Confluence, so it might take me longer to find it and check that the 
export was running as expected).

> Nothing more from me at the moment.  Mark might have additional comments since
> he's probably the most frequent author on the wiki.

I agree with Mark's comments on MoinMoin - it does support most of what 
you asked for in terms of history, attachments, groups and private 
pages. User groups and accesses can be defined in anticipation of the 
existence of a user account (ie you can define an acl which refers to a 
user that doesn't exist yet). There's a bit of a security problem there 
so I would think we'd also create user accounts with a random password 
and the user's email address - which can then be used for a reset.

Until we see the XML export we can't really say how much of that data we 
can get to in order to transform it across - but I'd be surprised if a 
lot of that data was not available.

I was going to say that our meta-data (other than author and revisions) 
support is a bit limited in moin1, however looking at the wiki pages in 
Confluence is doesn't look like there's much more there (or at least 
it's not being used). There may be better support in moin2 howver our 
advice from Thomas Waldmann of MoinMoin 
(http://moinmo.in/ThomasWaldmann) is that we should be aiming for 1.9 as 
2 is not yet ready for production.

> Thanks for your help!

No worries! Thanks for Mailman!

Cheerio,

  Brad

-- 
Bradley Dean
Email: bjdean at bjdean.id.au Skype: skype at bjdean.id.au
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