Hurd wiki/web pages (was: Ikiwiki maintenance)

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

For context: see
<https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/contributing/web_pages.html#index5h2>
"Staging Area" regarding the relationship between
<https://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/> and
<https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/>.

On 2021-11-09T15:32:18+0100, Richard Braun <rbraun@sceen.net> wrote:
> The ikiwiki package on darnassus has version 3.20140227, and it's
> starting to become a small problem with maintenance.

The Hurd wiki/web pages use a few ikiwiki plugins (kept inside the Hurd
web sources tree) that require "attention" (occasional
adaptation/porting) when updating ikiwiki.  Back then, I used to do that
every year or so -- but evidently have not for a long time, and I'm not
able to allocate proper time.

> How do we deal
> with that ?

I don't immediately have a good suggestion, I'm afraid.


Let's first work on answering the higher-level question, what we
generally want to do with (a) the wiki, and (b) the synchronization to
the GNU web server.  (Richard asked about darnassus/ikiwiki specifically,
but (b) is directly related to that, as the same ikiwiki rendering is
used for that.)

Is (a) still useful?  I found it useful, when I (really a lot!) and also
others did invest considerable time in maintaining the content.  After my
departure, Samuel as well as a few other contributors, one-off or more,
did continue to maintain the content -- so I do assume it still provides
more value than "baggage"?  From that it would follow that we should keep
the wiki alive, and thus need to resolve the ikiwiki issues in some way.
(Or, someone needs to invest proper time to convert the whole thing into
a more maintainable form, like I had done in 2007,
<https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/colophon.html>.)

Regarding (b), this too is non-trivial now, because all the changes of
the past years (since last time I did this, 2018-05-25) need to be
reviewed/"sanitized" to comply with GNU standards in order to be
published on the GNU web server.  (It seems that Samuel has manually
updated a few pages on the GNU web server, so these changes there also
need to be consolidated with an actual wiki rendering.  No criticism; I
very well understand that's the best he could easily do.)

As we're seeing, without dedicated maintenance (that I can't provide
anymore), it's problematic to keep a "wild" wiki and GNU-policied web
pages in sync.  Should we loosen the bonds: continue with the wiki, and
replace <https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/> with a new simple stub page?


Richard, sorry for not simply answering your actual question, but I hope
we'll get there.


Grüße
 Thomas