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

[Paul Boddie]

On Monday, 27 September 2021 15:31:25 CEST Lukasz Szybalski wrote:
> Hello
> I know moin 2 has quite few changes.
> But if we just run program 2to3 on moin 1.9 ? Does anyone here know if
> there would be a dependency that would not work? (Maybe except changing
> file open descriptors).

I think that converting Moin 1.9 to Python 3 would be non-trivial. A lot of 
people have described their experiences converting their code from Python 2 to 
Python 3, but there are several pitfalls including the differing string and 
file handling, although the change to lazy iteration in numerous parts of the 
library is the thing that usually causes me surprises.

I was actually corresponding with someone privately about the disappearance of 
Moin 1.9 from Debian (and Ubuntu) due to the Python 2 deprecation strategy, 
and I was wondering how the Debian infrastructure maintainers were planning to 
proceed in future. I joked with someone else that maybe they will use Docker 
to "solve" that problem, like so many people these days.

The one thing that put me off working on Moin 2 was the number of 
dependencies, particularly things that weren't generally packaged. It is 
possible that Moin 2 would be good enough for many people, but there never 
seemed to be a clear strategy in terms of either development or adoption, 
although I imagine this could be reviewed and plans put together.

Meanwhile, certain aspects of Moin 1.9 might be unappealing for anyone trying 
to modernise it. There is a lot of code in it whose equivalents are presumably 
much nicer in Moin 2, and then there are various bundled dependencies like 
Werkzeug whose general structure and design I find annoying: I never got used 
to debugging Moin behaviour involving Werkzeug, whereas the older request 
handling was at least laid out in a predictable way.

There might be an argument for a cut-down version of Moin - either version - 
which keeps everything simple for most deployment needs. A lot of stuff was 
added to Moin over the years, but I can easily imagine that most deployments 
of Moin are now rather defensive and conservative.

It is also tempting to make a workalike wiki solution that can serve Moin 
content and to remedy some of the issues. My own efforts focused on static 
publishing of Moin content because I don't want the hassle of managing a Web 
application when I don't edit through the Web.

However, I could envisage something simple that does through-the-Web editing 
and generates either completely static or dynamic (and cached) output, also 
managing document revisions a bit better, having seen that the separate 
storage of complete page revisions done in Moin 1.9 results in a lot of space 
being taken up.

Anyway, it would be interesting to hear other views about this situation.

Paul