preparing for the wiki move

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Matthew east wrote:

>I just saw that the pages from the old wiki have all been imported into
>the test wiki... so much for the plan that we evolved!
>
>Again the docteam was kept out of the loop while this was done :/ That
>frustrates me to some extent because of the time spent discussing how we
>can help recently.
>  
>
Sorry you feel that way, I probably should have informed you that we
were running this test. But the moving of these pages was purely a
technical exercise to develop a script to do the transfer. It doesn't
necessarily have any impact on what the final page structure will be
like. We developed a script to simply copy all the pages across from the
old to the test site to prove to ourselves that it can be done.

With 1500 pages this is an essential step, and doing a test run is the
only way to ensure that it works. That is one of the main purposes of
the test wiki. Also note that this is the first test run of the transfer
and is in no way final. The data at the zwiki site is still the official
version. So do not make updates on the test wiki as they will be lost!
(in the case where pages have the same name) I've added a warning on the
front page of the test wiki about this now.

As for the doc-team-specific pages, they can me renamed and restructured
after the transfer  or they can be excluded from the transfer and copied
manually, whatever we decide.  We can go with the 'doc/' structure that
we talked about, in which case we only need to rename those pages in the
new wiki to 'doc/PageName' and those links in the contents page will be
active. The down-side of that approach is that many existing links will
be broken (as discussed). I've since discovered a possible alternative
using page categories, that might allow us to keep most of the current
URLs, but still get better structure. See:
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/HelpOnCategories So one option is to keep
most of the current page names and use categories to create structure
and then create a 'stable/ section for the maturing docs that we've
talked about (previously known as 'Published wiki' 'doc/breezy'
'doc/trunk' doc/frozen' etc. -- it's all the same idea).

>Anyway, moving on from that ;) Are there any issues that we can help out
>with from the transition? The two questions that spring immediately to
>mind are:
>
>1. the pages which had contents born out of the zwiki parenting scheme
>have now lost that. What can/should we do to get them back?
>  
>
Yes, that is a structural difference between the two systems. I think
using the category system described in the above link might be the answer.

>2. is there any way to merge changes that will occur on the normal wiki
>into the new wiki?
>
The important thing is: don't make important changes on the TEST wiki.
The automated transfer takes about 1 hour to run and can be repeated any
number of times. The real and final transfer will over write all the
current pages in test and bring everything in sync. That will need to be
a highly coordinated exercise, which involves switching over the new
wiki to the existing URL. We still need to clear up a few technical
issues such as authentication and the wiki template (see:
http://gemini.starshine.org/Ubuntu WIP). The transfer should occur in
1-2 weeks and proper notice will then be given to everyone.

On remaining issues: We did not copy the restructured text in this trial
run, and the restructured text plugin is currently not installed in this
moin instance. Steve Alexander, who wrote the transfer script, wondered
if we really wanted to carry restructured format forward. Is it worth
the confusion of having two markup systems to choose from? Is the
restructured layout so very much better that it is worth keeping and/or
how difficult would it be to translate also those pages to Moin? If we
are transferring wiki docs into DocBook then I guess the layout can be
tweaked there (In other news: Mikko Virkkilä is making good progress on
a Moin -> DocBook parser)

- Henrik