Any discussion of replacing MoinMoin?

[kamaraju kusumanchi]

Hi folks,
MoinMoin, the wiki software backing the Debian Wiki, has suffered from slow
development recently; the latest release is in 2020, and it is written in Python
2.7. The Python 3.5 support is still under development.
Has anyone considered switching to any alternative? The Debian Wiki UI does not
attract users to contribute (no Wiki syntax highlight in the editor, for
example).

One of the drawbacks of MoinMoin wiki is the lack of Section Edit
feature. If you are choosing another wiki software, could you please
choose something that has this feature. It would come in handy for
editing large wiki pages.

thanks
raju

[Joost van Baal-Ilić]

Hi Franklin,

Thanks for your interest.

MoinMoin, the wiki software backing the Debian Wiki, has suffered from slow
development recently; the latest release is in 2020, and it is written in Python
2.7. The Python 3.5 support is still under development.
Has anyone considered switching to any alternative? The Debian Wiki UI does not
attract users to contribute (no Wiki syntax highlight in the editor, for
example).

I guess it could be useful, and would need someone willing to do the (lots of)
work and migration.

See also https://bugs.debian.org/501954 wiki.debian.org: #501954: "use
MediaWiki instead of MoinMoin" for some (old) background.

Bye,

Joost

[Martin]

Has anyone considered switching to any alternative? The Debian Wiki UI does not
attract users to contribute (no Wiki syntax highlight in the editor, for
example).

To me, the most desperately missing feature is having wiki content in a
VCS, such as git. I like to work on documentation like on code.

That would also solve the problem of syntax highlighting, because
editing is just done in ones favourite text editor.

I'm not sure, which wiki software does work that way. I assume gitit,
gollum, and ikiwiki do.

Cheers

[Paul Wise]

Post by Martin
To me, the most desperately missing feature is having wiki content in a
VCS, such as git. I like to work on documentation like on code.

This is a different kind of wiki to what Franklin and Kamaraju are used
to; MediaWiki is backed by a database instead of a VCS and has solely
web based editing with all the edit features provided by browsers and
JavaScript instead of local software.

Post by Martin
I'm not sure, which wiki software does work that way.

IIRC MoinMoin 2.x has an option for this. Steve McIntyre planned on
working on packaging it for Debian so that we can switch to it later.

[Martin]

Post by Paul Wise

Post by Martin
To me, the most desperately missing feature is having wiki content in a
VCS, such as git. I like to work on documentation like on code.

This is a different kind of wiki to what Franklin and Kamaraju are used
to; MediaWiki is backed by a database instead of a VCS and has solely
web based editing with all the edit features provided by browsers and
JavaScript instead of local software.

To the best of my knowledge (almost nothing, TBH) at least one of the
three, gollum, has an in-browser editor, too. Probably a good thing to
have, e.g. for smaller edits, corrections, etc.

For larger edits, I very much prefer using well-known tools such as
(ma)git, (e)diff. Esp. if multiple pages are involved and should be in
one commit.

Post by Paul Wise

Post by Martin
I'm not sure, which wiki software does work that way.

IIRC MoinMoin 2.x has an option for this. Steve McIntyre planned on
working on packaging it for Debian so that we can switch to it later.

Nice!