[Moin-user] Why oh why!

[Pierre Coupard]

Hello everybody,

So, I've used MoinMoin for years. I've advocated it at all my
workplaces, and each time, my boss and other employees ended up finding
it great and very useful.

So that's what I did at my new work last year. I installed MoinMoin
1.5.something from Debian-stable. I whipped up a couple of pages and
showed it to everybody.

People slowly adopted the wiki. I managed to get them to stop sharing
information files through Sharepoint, and to take some time to learn the
MoinMoin syntax and make their own pages.

Eventually they all did. They all invested a lot of effort into making
their pages, especially considering they aren't computer folks at all.

We collectively made hundreds of pages, choke full of attachments, links
to websites, internal files, other wiki pages and whatnot. We all took
care of making our pages properly formatted and legible.

Today, I upgraded the MoinMoin installation to version 1.7.1 because I
wanted to try TaskPlanner, and all hell broke loose. All our pages are
messed up.

A bit of Googling revealed that the syntax has changed quite
extensively. No matter I thought, MoinMoin is a mature, quality piece of
code, surely there's a "legacy syntax" setting somewhere so our pages
made with the old syntax work again. Well, none that I can find it turns
out. And here I am, looking at 2 or 3 days of reformatting of our pages,
my colleagues asking why the heck their hard work is all ruined, and my
boss breathing down my neck, asking me why he's paying me to fix
something that worked great before instead of doing my work, and why
everybody else's workflow is stalled.

Please tell me there's a setting to reuse all our work, or some script
to convert it to the new format quickly, otherwise I'm about to look
like a right knucklehead with my technical recommendations. I can't
believe the people who made the MoinMoin I know and like didn't care
about backward compatibility at least a little bit.