> a dead-end solution with a future of pain, fragility, and >(probably) unpatched security vulnerabilities while people scramble to find and implement a solution (that may no >longer exist within even a reasonable set of parameters).
I feel compelled to point out that if people spent half the time simply paying a software programmer to upgrade the codebase of these projects that they spend complaining about the projects becoming dead end, that they would have updated projects that work for a tenth of the price that Micro$oft wants them to pay for windows versions of things. How many hundreds if not thousands of wikis on the Internet that use Moinmoin have ever just considered posting a message "We just upgraded to Debian Bullseye and we get 10 compiler errors when attempting to build Moinmoin on it. $5000 to the first person who fixes that and produces a functioning binary, and feeds the changes back into the public source" OR, how many of them have picked up a compiler and tried their hand at fixing it themselves? Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG [mailto:plug-boun...@pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Paul Heinlein Sent: Monday, July 31, 2023 8:38 AM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug@pdxlinux.org> Subject: Re: [PLUG] wikis breaking on updates (was: Re: Upgrage Breaks MediaWiki - why?) On Sun, 30 Jul 2023, Russell Senior wrote: > A slightly related story: Debian's wiki is moinmoin. Moinmoin v1.x is > based on python 2. Python2 is (of course) deprecated and pretty much > abandoned as of Debian Bullseye. It seems somewhat ironic that the > wiki that proudly announces Debian 12 (bookworm) as of July 22, has to > run Debian 10 (buster, i.e. oldoldstable) because that's the last > version that supports python2 enough to run the wiki. > > > https://u35970666.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=TqJK0v-2BTL1dmkjS-2FZRB > wGRDG4t3PuCk88LFqqcTvyYGDJGeFNIjwU8pGkcA3tIrkXxPogHNGRue04tX0s41yELyVT > 2kQTzNKeJ1a3JRIU5c-3DkyL0_VIYZ4N8dmyIPGy7Y8nsPO1q5dom4O0HMDO1WKXG4iy6c > RPYqUFHozao-2Fpbo-2BoZqOchXuKORABSzW180gWYBHeRPNrdK7edxBEXDVaeFmkWm4xn > UhizY9EOtln7Mj8LEiArb78-2BbHAD0AsaSTK9AWj1JB0cOk7hkn-2BvgslB0tXdYqMV8B > ZkiZeBlgfBwozTDycTSoXvNA4kNrtVykLP6PwQ-3D-3D > > I have a particularly acute awareness of this because Personal Telco's > wiki also uses moinmoin, and it stopped working when I tried to update > to Debian 11 (bullseye) about a year ago. We had a brief outage while > I figured out what had gone wrong. This is a sadly familiar story. A high-level software package depends on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lower-level language runtimes, libraries, and even utilities. One or more of those lower-level packages gets deprecated, drops features, becomes orphaned, or simply doesn't keep up with the rest of the dependency ecosystem. Voila -- a dead-end solution with a future of pain, fragility, and (probably) unpatched security vulnerabilities while people scramble to find and implement a solution (that may no longer exist within even a reasonable set of parameters). I feel vaguely guilty every time I say it, but if computers were easy I wouldn't have a job. -- Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com 45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
