New Wiki (Was: New Howto)

[Randall Wood]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 4:18 AM, Martin Krischik
<krischik at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Zitat von Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org>:
>
>> On Jun 11, 2008, at 01:15, Martin Krischik wrote:
>>
>>>> I would say, if I had a vote (who does?), that whatever people are willing
>>>> to use wins. It may not be elegant or state of the art, but the best is the
>>>> enemy of the good, and good is usually good enough.
>>>
>>> I like to point out one more aspect: *If* we are going for a new Wiki
>>> we might as well replace the homepage as well. For a week or so there
>>> was consensus (as in: no one disagreed) that a link from the homepage
>>> to the HowTo would be helpful - yet it has not been done.
>>>
>>> Let me check .... No still not done.
>>>
>>> And we would not be the first project to go "all wiki":
>>>
>>> http://gnuada.sourceforge.net/
>>> http://uiq3.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
>>> http://vimplugin.org/

I don't know of any large project to go all wiki. Even
wikimedia/wikipedia has locked down much of its wiki in the same way
that www.macports.org is locked down against random edits of anyone.

>>
>> The proposed new wiki was to be a global Mac OS Forge documentation
>> wiki, not a MacPorts-specific wiki. I'm still not a fan of the idea. Do
>> we really want to spend the time and energy converting content from the
>> MacPorts Trac wiki to a Mac OS Forge MediaWiki when we have more
>> important things we could be doing?

Does anyone remember when MacPorts and Fink used the same mediawiki
instance for their wiki? Namespaces, interlinking, and searches were
fun as one project would get the nice page name or search results
would kick you from one project to the other...it was not nice, to say
the least.

> I don't know either - but if we do I propose we replace the home pages
> (and macports guide) as well.

We should not replace these. We can improve them and change the
workflow that controls them, but I do not like the idea of replacing
(relatively) static and controlled information sources with a
completely open one.

> Note that a quick check shows that Bonjour, BridgeSupport, CalendarServer,
> MacRuby etc. use the track wiki as home page.
>
> *If* we go thue the trouble of installing media wiki - or any other
> large scale wiki - then we might as well use it for the homepage and
> the guide as well.
>
> But note the *if* - maybe the track wiki is enough after all - in
> which case I suggest we move at least the guide to track wiki as well
> to have more in one place.

The trac wiki has a couple of major advantages over other wikis,
particularly for our project: integrated ticketing and svn browsing.
If we cut off part of trac, we need to loose it all, and that means
also standing up bugzilla, and using viewcvs (which is just ugly after
trac) and none of these are integrated, and ...wait... we've returned
to the old opendarwin.org infrastructure, and all of its maintenance
headaches (it was essentially abandoned because of the amount of
maintenance work involved).

>  From my quick check I also noted that MacPorts clearly is the largest
> Project on MacOS Forge ao we might as well take the lead.
>
> Martin
>
>
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-- 
Randall Wood
randall.h.wood at alexandriasoftware.com

"The rules are simple: The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes.
All the rest is just philosophy."