Re: Google Summer of Code 2013 (GSoC13)

From: Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 19, 2013, 07:51 UTC
Message-ID: <CALkWK0=_kpmUOYS5J6L2+JPzmeW_9+bVAu4eN=dr8kPMbuTn8w@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <878v6lwfrt.fsf@pctrast.inf.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast wrote:

Show 28 quoted lines

> Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@gmail.com> writes:
>
> [...]
>>>> On a related note, I don't like our Wiki.  It's down half the time,
>>>> and it's very badly maintained.  I want to write content for our Wiki
>>>> from the comfort of my editor, with version control aiding me.  And I
>>>> can't stand archaic WikiText.
>>>
>>> Agreed on all of those points. Putting the Wiki on GitHub fixes that.
>>> But it means contributors need to have a GitHub account. On the other
>>> hand, I think kernel.org wiki contributors need an account these days?
>>> And GitHub is putting some active effort into finding and killing spammy
>>> accounts, which might keep wiki spam down (I do not pay too much
>>> attention to those efforts, but on kernel.org, it is mostly up to the
>>> Git community to do it ourselves).
>>
>> No, I'm against using the GitHub Wiki for neutrality reasons.  There
>> is one easy way to fight spam: don't expose a web-based editing
>> interface at all.  It's mainly going to be maintained by the
>> community, and we're all much more comfortable in our editors and git.
>>  We can give the regulars direct commit access and ask the rest to
>> submit pull requests.  Make it cost pennies, so any of us can easily
>> afford it: just a cheap domain, DNS, and static HTML hosting.
>
> I suppose since github's wiki system (gollum) is open source [1] it
> wouldn't be too hard to set up another instance somewhere.  Bonus points
> for importing all the old data in mediawiki format first, which is also
> apparently supported.

Yes, I am aware. However, I don't think gollum fits our purposes well: we really don't need much more than plain text. What do you want to import? We can copy out the text from the previous GSoC pages, but most of the other pages are filled with ancient junk. We don't want a museum: we want a clean Wiki with crisp, clean up-to-date information.

> But that just shifts the point of failure from the entire github team to
> one or two people who end up administering the server.

... which is the entire problem. We don't want to "administer" things. We're programmers who're competent at writing plain text and maintaining git repositories, so let's stick to doing that; I'm pushing for static HTML hosting for exactly this reason: there is nothing to "administer", no security exploits, no unexpected breakages. It also reflects our community's affinity for simplicity.

> Perhaps a better solution would be to ask Scott or Peff to create a
> gollum instance under git-scm.com, which they're already hosting?

Failing that, just a CNAME entry for "wiki" under git-scm.com would suffice. What does static HTML hosting cost anyway?

> (It
> seems people got over *that* neutrality issue quickly enough.)

There's a big difference between having git-scm.com as our official website, and hosting our official Wiki on https://github.com/git/git/wiki. Although it is built by people working in GitHub, with its sources in github.com/github/gitscm-next, it makes no effort to reference GitHub directly.

Ofcourse, there are many things I dislike about the website, and would have preferred a community-built one. Unfortunately, building a website involves doing design work that we programmers are incompetent at. So, I think of it as a practical compromise that we have to live with.