[Mailman-Developers] Wiki woes

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 12 December 2012 04:17:54 Barry Warsaw wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> On Dec 11, 2012, at 11:15 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:
> >I was under the impression that people would be following the dedicated
> >mailing list for this work (mmwiki), but it would appear that this is not
> > the case.
>
> Dang.  You probably made me/us aware of the mailing list at one time, and
> if so, I apologize for not engaging on it.

Actually, it was Bradley Dean who tried to get MoinMoin developers involved 
and who set up the list. I found the following message on this list about it:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2011-July/021509.html

> >In fact, it touches upon the very issue that seems to be causing problems
> >now: Confluence appears to have changed and useful functionality has been
> >removed.  Although this affects Confluence users in a negative way, it may
> >have an impact on the exported form used in any migration work as well.
>
> Again, darn.  I don't know if it helps but for this particular case, we can
> get you access to whatever data you need, that might not be publicly
> available via wiki.list.org.

The first priority is to find out whether Confluence content can still be 
exported as XML. The data dumps that I originally used were XML 
serialisations of Hibernate databases, but given the user-visible changes 
from Confluence 3 to 4, I would need reassuring that Atlassian haven't gone 
and changed the back-end stuff as well.

To investigate this, I have just been attempting to use the "XML export" 
function from the "Advanced" tab of each space on wiki.list.org. Here's the 
link to the COM space's "XML export" function:

http://wiki.list.org/spaces/exportspacexml.action?key=COM

This did yield an export file that appears to contain data in a similar format 
to the original data dumps I managed to obtain. I don't know whether the 
files I have exported are comprehensive because I'm not even a user of the 
Wiki, let alone an administrator or someone with privileges, but maybe all 
the pages are public anyway.

Aside from the general structure of the exported files, I can see that the 
markup has been preserved in the textual content, but only for revisions 
before the Confluence 4 migration. Migrated markup is actually in some 
XHTML-like format, which is in some ways easier to work with than the 
original markup, but it will obviously need a different translator than the 
one handling the original markup.

[...]

> >Please let me know if you want to take this work any further.
>
> Mark and Terri probably should weigh in, but my own feeling is that the
> conversion doesn't have to be of the highest fidelity.  E.g. if it gets us
> 80-90% of the way, that's probably good enough.  As Terri implies, I do
> think the wiki could use a good gardening, probably splitting content for
> MM2 and MM3 among other things.  I'm loathe to do much gardening on the
> current wiki if we're going to make a switch.

The aim would be to try and get the conversion as high-fidelity as possible 
with some experimentation around editing and playing with any required Moin 
features, and then we'd convert the whole thing one last time.

Some discussion about what should converted can be found here:

http://moinmo.in/ConfluenceConverter/DevelopmentNotes/TransformProcess

Lacking from my current converter is any handling of attachments or 
identities, with the latter probably requiring some special modification of 
the import code to write specific user identities into the edit log.

Confluence has some weird functionality that doesn't always map to Moin 
concepts, like spaces, blog posts and page comments, but as I note on the 
above page these can be accommodated in Moin according to various page-naming 
conventions.

> If this is something you're interested in helping with, it would certainly
> be greatly appreciated.
>
> Is Moin 2.0 far enough along that we can just start using that?

Not really. It's something you can use, but there are still things that need 
to settle down in Moin 2 and there is obviously functionality that isn't yet 
ported. I aim to port much of my own work to Moin 2 at some point, but 
there's still a lot of mileage in Moin 1.x. (It's like Python 2 versus Python 
3.)

> (I love that you'll be able to author pages in reST. :)

You lose some of the more interesting features doing that, though, I think.

> We also need hosting, but I think we've had offers for that (sorry, I can't
> remember the details, but they're in the list archives I'm sure).  Once we
> have hosting, I can ask Matt and John to give us some A records.

For testing purposes, I can easily host this myself, but you'll obviously have 
to consider where to put the final Wiki. It's possible that the FSF already 
host things using MoinMoin, so maybe it would fit into their existing 
infrastructure, but this is something for you to decide.

For now, I have made the Wiki content available at the following location:

http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/

As noted, all current page revisions will look wrong, but historical (before 
Confluence 4) revisions should have been translated to a certain extent.

Paul