Re: [Moin-user] MoinMoin Development Activity

2016-03-24 Thread Iain Mac Donald 
On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 13:59:34 +0100
Rudolf Reuter  wrote:

> I am very happy with Moin 1.9.
> It is stable, has all the features I need, and the pages are easy to
> backup with rsync. I think stability and reliability are more
> important for a wiki than fancy features.

+1

One feature I use a lot is searching using 3, 4 or 5 characters from a
page name. If there are multiple pages using these characters you get a
search result listing several pages. If there is only one page you get
that one page returned. I find this is very handy and I was sad to hear
it disappear in Moin 2+.

As others have mentioned things they would like to see...

I don't know if this counts as a fancy feature but one thing that
confuses non-technical users is the full text search results. The
results show snippets of text surrounding the search term but this is
displayed as markup not natural language. For people not familiar with
markup that can look odd. 

I don't mind trying applications in virtualenvs as they have become
second nature to me. However, I draw the line at having to download
multi-gigabyte Docker containers. ;-)

Regards,
Iain.

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Re: [Moin-user] MoinMoin Development Activity

2016-03-24 Thread Rudolf Reuter 

  
  
Hello,
  
  I am very happy with Moin 1.9. 
  It is stable, has all the features I need, and the pages are easy
  to backup with rsync.
  I think stability and reliability are more important for a wiki
  than fancy features.
  
  My only wish for the future is a port to Python version 3.
  
  A big Thank You to the clever developers.
  
  Regards, Rudolf
  
  Am 23.03.16 um 21:50 schrieb anton:


  Hi,

I just looked at moinmoin since a longer time period.

The last bitbucket comit is about 9 months ago,
so for me it looks thats its silently dead ...
as your question has not got an answer since one month...

Its sad.

Anton

Paul Boddie wrote:


  
Hello,

I guess this isn't the most effective place to ask this question, but I
suppose it reaches an audience who might also be wondering the same thing.
What is the current situation around MoinMoin development, with respect to
Moin 1.9 (which is noted as being the current production version) as well
as with Moin 2.0 (which still seems to be in a rather fluid state)?

I was indeed trying to follow what has been going on with Moin 2.0,
finding that the repository hadn't been updated for months, until I
discovered that only the Bitbucket-hosted repository seems to be updated
these days. I have had some vague intentions to port some extensions to
Moin 2.0, but it appears that there are lots of packages I have to get
from the Python Package Index (or whatever it is called these days), and
my perception is that porting those extensions hasn't become any easier
since I last looked. What is the current situation there?

As for Moin 1.9, I have quite a few patches that never made it upstream,
and I've just spent a couple of hours looking at them again. Some of them
can be found here:

https://moinmo.in/PaulBoddie

(Things like
https://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/EnhancedDiffsForRecentChanges are so
useful that it just annoys me now when I visit a Moin site and have to
look at individual diffs from a sequence of edits, or have to play with
controls in the "info" page, when I can instead view the before-after diff
from a RecentChanges link with that patch.)

Is there any interest in such patches or any other development for Moin
1.9. A while ago, I wondered if a Moin 1.10 would be helpful, but my
impression was that this would be counterproductive and undermine Moin
2.0. So what should we be doing about this?

With the current fashion of people migrating their own hosted applications
to dubious cloud providers with their own awful wiki implementations, I
think that more could be done to demonstrate that Moin is both viable and
preferable. Things like antispam protection could be usefully enhanced:
this is probably one of the biggest problems (and most credible arguments
to migrate away from Moin) that a bit of effort could meaningfully
address.

What are other people's thoughts on such matters?

Paul



  
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Re: [Moin-user] MoinMoin Development Activity

2016-03-24 Thread Paul Boddie 
On Thursday 24. March 2016 02.06.27 John Hurst wrote:
> These are very relevant questions from my perspective.  I have been running
> a moin 1.9 site for 6 years or so, and having been promising people who
> comment on its weaker points that "Moin 2 is coming soon".  But I am
> starting to lose that argument, and there are those who suggest that
> moving to a more modern wiki would be advantageous.

Actually, I'm not particularly convinced by the other wiki solutions. There's 
MediaWiki if you want to go completely mainstream, but I've worked with that 
and it can be very annoying: it's written in PHP, didn't even have proper help 
pages to deploy when I was using it, essential extensions were downloadable 
via *user* pages on the MediaWiki site, and so on.

It seems to me that various more fashionable wikis than MediaWiki (the ones 
that appear to use Git as a storage engine - not necessarily a feature in my 
opinion) either don't provide the same usability as Moin or are often deployed 
so poorly so that the experience is half-broken. There are wikis that try to 
be something else - apparently things like TWiki went off and did this, and 
there's the proprietary Confluence which seems to be all about doing this - 
but again, the usability suffers according to what people have told me about 
them.

So, Moin is still a good choice, but I feel that Moin 2 has drifted away 
without really bringing people with it. I did look at trying it out again 
recently but was put off by the huge number of dependencies and the apparent 
need to use a virtualenv (or whatever) to even try it out. I know that people 
should be using other people's code instead of writing their own, but most of 
that code should be mature and widely available. Otherwise, the effect is the 
same as the project delivering lots of code you don't already have installed 
and making it harder to adopt and deploy.

> I have explored how I might help the development of moin 1/2 flavours, but
> found that I tended to get rather frustrated when I went looking for
> documentation.  For example, I have had trouble in maintaining various
> home grown flavours of macros, but short of spending my waking hours
> reverse engineering code, found it difficult to make much progress (yes,
> what are the entities in a "request"?).

The Moin 1.8 to 1.9 transition introduced various problems with the request 
handling, and I still have to remember which subpackage the request attributes 
are really defined in, as opposed to the boilerplate subpackages which just 
add another abstraction layer. I have no idea what Moin 2 does for this, 
although I seem to remember it being an evolved form of 1.9.

> As a (now retired) academic, I spent years exhorting students to document
> their code, and trying to set a good example for them to follow
> (http://www.ajhurst.org/~ajh/teaching/fit2070/2014/labs/index.xml).

That's an interesting set of resources that I'll have to look at later!

> And I understand that the moin development is by volunteers, who receive
> little thanks and many complaints.  But if we can spread the load by
> encouraging others to join the development, then I would hope emails such as
> these would no longer be necessary.

Indeed.

> So can anyone help me to help you?  Where to I find the sort of
> documentation that would help a newbie to the inner workings of moin
> become more engaged?

I was fortunate enough to get a tour of Moin from Thomas back at a conference 
(ten years ago!), even though I wasn't really looking to do anything with Moin 
at the time, but I'll admit that my knowledge of Moin has been built up over 
time. It's very possible that the developer documentation really needs 
improving to match the changes over the years and to remove material that 
refers to hypothetical enhancements that were never made:

https://moinmo.in/MoinDev

I've written a few extensions over the years [*], and perhaps I should be 
trying to document them a bit more. Practical guidance is usually better than 
just pointing someone at an API reference, after all.

Paul

[*] https://moinmo.in/PaulBoddie

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Re: [Moin-user] MoinMoin Development Activity

2016-03-23 Thread Paul Boddie 
On Wednesday 23. March 2016 21.50.18 anton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just looked at moinmoin since a longer time period.
> 
> The last bitbucket comit is about 9 months ago,
> so for me it looks thats its silently dead ...
> as your question has not got an answer since one month...
> 
> Its sad.

Indeed. Looking at the Moin 2.0 repository on Bitbucket...

https://bitbucket.org/thomaswaldmann/moin-2.0

...it appears that there was some kind of activity in February. I guess that 
development of things has drifted over to Bitbucket without any real 
indication of why that happened. And the IRC logs have been even less 
informative than usual. I haven't been on IRC to ask questions, however.

Of course, Moin 1.x (and Moin 2.0) can be as active as we want them to be, 
regardless of what Thomas and others are doing these days [*]. Since people 
are still actively using and deploying Moin, perhaps some efforts should be 
made to push it/them forward in the direction of our choosing.

One thing that I thought about a while ago was to improve the anti-spam 
mechanisms. It seems that a lot of public Moin deployments these days use 
external mechanisms to grant accounts (such as the old-fashioned "ask someone 
to give you an account" approach), but there is some potential for improving 
the basic measures so that spam account creation doesn't happen so easily. 
Having a usable and secure "out of the box" policy for editing is probably the 
highest priority improvement I can think of.

Other than enhancements like that, I can imagine some tidying up of the code 
being useful. I think the argument that we should all be making Moin 2.0 ready 
for wider usage doesn't really hold up so well any more. Ideally, Moin 2.0 
would indeed be ready for people to deploy and would support Moin 1.x features 
so that people would just migrate, but things didn't get that far. Meanwhile, 
people who like Moin still seem to deploy Moin 1.x.

Does anyone else have any ideas for things that could be improved/fixed in 
Moin 1.x? Would a Moin 1.10 be a worthwhile exercise after all?

Paul

[*] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/borgbackup/2016q1/date.html

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