The Hurd wiki

[Thomas Schwinge]

[If you follow up, you might want to do so sending mail to only
<URL:mailto:web-hurd@gnu.org>; people interested the topic started below
may want to join <URL:http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/web-hurd>;
I'll later--once we have an agreement--post a summary to all lists
again.]

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 05:29:30PM +0200, Tom Bachmann wrote:
> Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > > [Writing documentation for this and that and everything.]
> > More importantly, neither of us [Marcus and Neal] currently has the
> > time to pursue this full time or even part time.  Nothing can be done
> > about it.

Understandable.

> It might be useful to give into public the bits that are already done
> (as you did)

Agreed.


> and adding it to the wiki content.

Let me elaborate a bit; this is the reason for posting this mail to a
number of mailing lists.

Since the old Hurd wiki is basically no longer satisfying both content
wise and software wise and both parts are rather unfrugal to get sorted
out easily, I'm about to present an idea of a new wiki system Neal
pointed me to: <URL:http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net/>, which is in fact a
system I've loosely been thinking about and looking for (i.e. not
systematically) for months (well..., years).


Appetizer:

The wiki's content (formatted in a simple, hardly noticeable, most
intuitive meta language) is stored in a repository of a common revision
control system.  Subversion is implemented, others seem to be rather
trivial to add, I have darcs in mind.

Basically, all that the wiki system does is take the content from the
revision control system and compile it into HTML pages.

That means, you can check-out the repository at home, work on it
(off-line) using your favourite version of Emacs (or ed ;-) and later
commit it or send a patch.  This sounds really appealing to me.

Alternatively you can work on the wiki's content like you do with every
other wiki system: clumsily in your browser.


I need some more time to evaluate it, but would already appreciate input
of every manner.


If / why we need a wiki and topics like that are to be discussed on the
web-hurd mailing list, please.


Regards,
 Thomas


P.S. The wiki engine is written in Perl.  But wait.  Joey states to care
about the system's security, so I suppose he is not writing it akin to
the way most of the other commonly known Perl hackery is written in.  ;-)