OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Paul Rubin]

Alexander Schremmer <2004b at usenet.alexanderweb.de> writes:
> > I need to set up a wiki for a small group.  I've played with MoinMoin
> > a little bit and it's reasonably straightforward to set up, but
> > limited in capabilities and uses BogusMarkupConventions.
> 
> At which point do you see limitations?

It doesn't have features that MW has, like user pages, lists of
incoming links to wiki pages, automatic discussion links for every
wiki page, automatic update notification for specific pages of your
choice, support for managing image uploads and embedding them
into wiki pages, etc. etc.

> And what of the markup don't you like?

The BogusMixedCaseLinkNames.  I'd rather have ordinary words with
spaces between them, like we use in ordinary writing.

> > In the larger world, though, there's currently One True wiki package,
> > namely Mediawiki (used by Wikipedia).
> 
> It is just very famous because of Wikipedia IMHO.

Well, it's gotten a lot more development attention because of that
same Wikipedia.

> Having a DBMS backend is good in your opinion? It has some severe
> disadvantages like not easy to scale (you would need to setup DBMS
> replication), two potential points of failure, more complex setup, bigger
> memory requirements, etc.

I didn't say that it was good, in fact I was listing it as a
disadvantage there.  I think for a small wiki like I was discussing,
it's just an extra administrative hassle.  For a large wiki though,
MoinMoin's approach is completely unworkable and MoinMoin's
documentation actually says so.  First of all MoinMoin uses a separate
subdirectory for every page, and all those subdirs are in a flat top
level directory, so if you have 100,000 wiki pages, the top level
directory has that many subdirs.  Most file systems are not built to
handle such large directories with any reasonable speed.  (Also, every
revision has its own file in the subdir.  Lots of Wikipedia pages have
thousands of revisions).  Second, DBMS's have indexes and
transactions, that make it simple to have features like "what links
here".  Yes you could do something like that in MoinMoin with
additional files, but then you'd have to update multiple files when
you commit a change, which can leave stuff inconsistent if there's a
crash partway through the update (I wonder just how crash-resilient
MoinMoin is right now, even).  The DBMS can also handle stuff like
replication automatically.

> If you really want to use the wiki for content, you have to agree on
> a markup style. You could use an independent one (like
> RestructuredText) and hope that MediaWiki supports it (MoinMoin
> does). Or you end up writing complex migration scripts just for the
> markup.

I looked at RestructuredText once and hated it.  WikiMedia's markup
language has bogosities just like anything else, but for the most part
it's not too bad.  Anyway, lots more people are used to it than any
other Wiki markup language, just because of Wikipedia's popularity.

> > Is anyone here actually running Mediawiki who can say just how
> > big a hassle it is?
> 
> A few months I tried to install it. I got it running. But I did not like
> the necessary complex administration tasks.

I'm not too surprised.  That's why MoinMoin was the first one I tried.

> > The other one will be public and is planned grow to medium size (a few
> > thousand active users)
>
> There are even MoinMoin sites that are as big as that. Maybe you should
> rethink your kind of prejudice and re-evaluate MoinMoin.

I don't doubt there are MoinMoin sites that size, but with that large
a user base, I want something nicer looking than those
StupidMixedCasePageNames.