OT: MoinMoin and Mediawiki?

[Alexander Schremmer]

On 11 Jan 2005 08:49:52 -0800, Paul Rubin wrote:

> 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,

It does.
> lists of incoming links to wiki pages,

It does.

> automatic discussion links for every wiki page, 

Can be easily obtained manually. Just include another page where discussion
is going on. You can even protect it with different ACL config etc.

> automatic update notification for specific pages of your
> choice, 

It does.

> support for managing image uploads and embedding them
> into wiki pages, 

It does.

> 
>> 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.

Of course it does. It does not even require [[ but [" at the beginning of
the link which might be more intuitive to the writer.

>>> 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.

Yeah, but you know: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

>> Having a DBMS backend is good in your opinion?

> 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.

But many other are.

>  (Also, every revision has its own file in the subdir.  Lots of Wikipedia pages have
> thousands of revisions).  

Yeah, same point. But if you have a working btree+ etc. implementation in
your FS, then it should not a problem. Personally, I just see another
problem at this point: paths might get very long if your page names are
long. This might result in problems on Windows. But you have to use very
long page names to hit the 256 char limit.

> The DBMS can also handle stuff like replication automatically.

But this is non-trivial.

>>> 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.

See above. Just because most people still work with CamelCase, they are not
the only solution. ["Stupid mixed case page names"] is a completly valid
link in MoinMoin and has been one for years.

Kind regards,
Alexander