[moin-user] Moin no longer in debian stable?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 07:28:28PM -0500, Lukasz Szybalski wrote:

>    I use moinmoin in lucasmanual.com
>    I see the package is not in debian stable anymore?
>
>    Can someone tell me why not, and what needs to get done to bring it back?

There is no debian stable moin.moin package anymore,
but with the sage advice of gentleman and scholar Paul
Boddie, there are two workarounds.

Moin 2.0 is somewhere over the rainbow, not available
for practical purposes.  Existing Moin 1.x deployments
will probably need a lot of tweaking to be compatible
with Moin 2.0 (eventually), a process I dread.

Moin 1.x depends on Python 2, which is no longer being
updated - all the Kool Kids are using Python 3.

However - python2 is still available for LTS versions of
Debian, such as the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS distro I am deploying
on my Rimuhosting virtual server.

To make moin 1,x use python2, perhaps all I need to do
is change the first line of  /usr/local/bin/moin 

from #! /usr/bin/python
to   #! /usr/bin/python2

Moin will not install as a debian package, but it can still
be built from "source".  Perhaps we can write simplified
install procedures for our own flavors of Debian.  Perhaps
some clever person can create a .deb package, which we can
share privately.

Gentleman Paul also works on moinlight, a python script
that creates static html web pages out of a deployed
moin instance. 

Though I use moin as my virtual web notebook, I can set
up a moinlight based script to create a separate set of
URLs on my server that serve up static "release" versions
of my work, directing the web searchbots to those.  I also
hope to create archival DVDs with static content on them.

And if Moin 1.x/python 2 develops a critical security flaw,
I can edit on a private server and deploy only static html.

That's all hypothetical for now - I haven't finished
setting up my new server.  However, if we struggle
through this transition together, we can learn from
each other's successes and failures.  I will contribute
plenty of failures ... :-)

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com