[moin-devel] returning back and what are your plans?

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 15. August 2018 17.53.21 Reimar Bauer wrote:
> 
> after a long break in actively developing moin-2 I am thinking about
> refactoring it to moin-3 (py3) and getting it in a state that we could
> migrate a bunch of our wikis.

First of all, welcome back!

I've never been able to get into doing anything with Moin 2. It seems like 
there are so many dependencies, and I just don't buy into the Python-centric 
way of handling dependencies. Moreover, delegating dependency management to 
Python-only tools does little to help packaging for operating system 
distributions.

Apart from that, I think that the focus of many people has been to keep what 
they already have working. Unfortunately, bugs have gone unfixed upstream. I 
guess that Thomas isn't so interested in Moin any more, or is this a complete 
misinterpretation? Having noted that the Debian people use and improve Moin 
quite a bit, maybe they have something to say about this.

> I think it is worse to do that refactoring with moin-1.9.

Yes, I think Moin 1.9 is not a particularly great place to start, and I guess 
the idea with Moin 2 was to start from a better place, even though certain 
things were carried forward, as far as I can tell.

> We have a little more than one year and if we want to keep moinmoin
> alive - now a bit more pressure. ;)

Is this "one year" related to Python 2 no longer being supported by the core 
developers from 2020? I could have many things to say about that, few of them 
particularly kind.

> Goal is to get a wiki like system, addons done later.
> 
> So what do you think? Who is in a similiar situation than me and wants
> to spend time?

Well, I don't know if you've been following the list, but there hasn't been 
too much traffic of late. I noted recently that for some of my sites, I don't 
need an active Moin instance since I'm just using Moin to deploy content. To 
avoid maintenance issues - log and cache files ballooning, worries about how 
secure things are - I've been writing tools to deal with Moin-formatted 
content plus accessories such as the Graphviz parser.

If nothing else happens, I'll just plod along getting these tools to a state 
where I'll use them to publish content. Then, maybe I'll expand them to work 
with Mercurial (or other directory-centric tools) so that I can push content 
around and some kind of distributed editing can be done. I believe that Hatta 
tried this kind of thing out, but it didn't/doesn't support Moin-formatted 
content.

Anyway, you now have some of my thoughts on the matter to consider!

Paul