[Mailman-Developers] Wiki Migration Update

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 16, 2013, at 08:17 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:

>> * Once we migrate we can probably get rid of the spaces.  I think that's a
>>   Confluence-ism that doesn't translate as well to Moin.  That should be
>> easy enough to do manually, right?
>
>The only apparent purpose of the spaces is to separate the content and to 
>prevent name collisions, but I'm not sure there are any such collisions. 
>Maybe I can check this.

I'd be surprised if there were any collisions.  Spaces seemed to be baked into
Confluence, but for our modest wiki I never really saw much value in them.

>> * We'll want a moderate amount of theming to be more consistent with the
>> web site, but the latter also is in dire need of an update.
>>
>> * The top link on the FAQ page doesn't work.
>>   http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/DOC/Frequently%20Asked%20Questions
>
>Yes, that page has a name ending in a question mark, and the way I host this 
>publicly doesn't like that. It's a bug in mod_rewrite, and if I host it on my 
>own local Apache instance with full control over the configuration, I don't 
>get this problem. It will go away in future, I promise. :-)

Cool.  That's another thing to take notice of: are there any deployment issues
we'd need to inform the python.org admins of?  We already run a couple of
Moins on that infrastructure, so I'm hoping that it'll be pretty easy to bring
up another one.

>Actually, I could have changed the page title generation to remove trailing 
>question marks for this exercise; I already shorten page names where the 
>filesystem would otherwise be upset (Moin needing to use the page names when 
>storing pages).

That's probably fine too.

>> * Only the FAQ 4 page has sub-FAQ numbers.  (BTW, do you know of any Moin
>>   feature to make creating and managing a FAQ nicer?)
>
>I'm sorry but I don't quite follow the first sentence here. All of the pages 
>should show a list of questions in their respective section, but I see that 
>only section 4 has numbered pages. Is that what you meant?

Yep.

>The page names I take straight from Confluence, and you can see the same
>phenomenon in the existing wiki:
>
>http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions

Yay. ;)

>Of other Moin sites providing FAQs, I can think of the Mercurial Wiki:
>
>http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/FAQ
>
>Here, they use the Include macro to bring in subpages providing each section, 
>and the Moin TableOfContents macro is smart enough to see all the included 
>content and make a huge TOC. They could go further and also provide edit 
>links when including content: then, if anyone wanted to edit a section or a 
>question, they would be able to find the link for the subpage and do so; 
>editing the main page only really permits editing of the Include macros and 
>little else, as seen in the raw text of the page:
>
>http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/FAQ?action=raw
>
>As you can see from the existing translation of the Mailman Wiki, it's 
>possible to include many pages without having to name them all; take a look 
>at the last line of the following, which is used to drag in all the comments 
>on the page:
>
>http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/COM/Home?action=raw
>
>The ordering seems to be fixed on the page names concerned, however, making
>it somewhat awkward if you prefer a different ordering, but we could always
>provide a variant of the Include macro that supported other ordering
>capabilities, I imagine.

Oh, I'm just pining for Guido's old FAQwizard.  It was nice to be able to just
add questions and answers, with a minimal amount of categorization and
ordering, and then have them all collected and formatted correctly.  It's not
that big of a deal - I was mostly wondering how other projects maintained
their FAQ.

>> * How will we control wiki spam on the new site?  Right now, we allow
>> anyone to sign up and read, but they must request write access.  When they
>> do, we add their userid to a special group that has write to any wiki page
>> (except the currently unused private pages).  Can we have the same setup
>> for Moin? I think it's *probably* okay to just have people re-request write
>> access after a migration (no need to automate the user/group migration I
>> think).
>
>Moin is very flexible about access control, so we can almost certainly
>support what is needed. As for registration, I think there are extensions
>that require people to verify themselves using e-mail - the Debian Wiki may
>be using this, I think - and it's probably completely feasible to support
>this kind of mechanism.
>
>As for migration, I haven't looked into this, but I don't see too many 
>problems at least replicating the Confluence accounts, even if we can't 
>migrate all the details.

Sounds good, thanks.

>(I think it's interesting to consider issues of authentication, and 
>coincidentally with respect to the Summer of Code work, I've been playing 
>with PGP-signed/encrypted interactions with Moin. So I look forward to seeing 
>what people come up with around such interactions with Mailman.)

Me too!

>> It seems to me the Moin wiki is pretty darn close.  If Mark and others
>> agree, I can start the ball rolling to request the necessary resources and
>> DNS shuffles.
>
>My main concern is that I've missed some weird markup behaviour and that we 
>end up with pages where the markup is completely wrong throughout the history 
>of the page (both Confluence markup and the XHTML variant that Confluence 4 
>and later use). But I'd like to think that I'm reaching the second half of 
>the exercise at the very least. ;-)
>
>Paul
>
>P.S. I can perhaps regenerate the site to work around the question mark
>issue, if you want. Then, all of the content should be navigable.

That would be fantastic, thanks.  Let's wait for Mark's feedback and then we
can start thinking about next steps.

Cheers,
-Barry