[Nix-dev] wiki and utf-8 characters

[Joachim Schiele]

On 03/21/2013 06:03 PM, Marc Weber wrote:
>> You can push to the wiki with git too, no?
> Thanks - I didn't knew this - then you can clone the wiki and have a
> normal git repo for it - and merge as appropriate.
>
> At least it would be fast to setup, spam and utf-8 issues would be gone,
> too
>
> But still I'd like to hear what those running the wiki have to say.
>
> Marc Weber

some time back i was doing some mediawiki stuff for wiki.nixos.org (like 
writing the stylesheet). i currently think that mediawiki is not  a good 
thing to maintain, especially with a database like mysql. the 
wiki.nixos.org uses postgresql as backend.

i would like to use something similar to what Marc Weber came up with:
 > As alternative I'd like to suggest evaluating pros/cons of using a git
 > based wiki: Track wiki contents as text files (using any markup), then
 > accept pull requests. Reviewing the wiki almost as important as reviewing
 > code IMHO.

for my blog i use ikiwiki right now and one advantage is that you can 
download the whole documentation in source (many *.mdwn files) easily. 
also offline mdwn to html generators _are_ available (ikiwiki/octopress).
however, i doubt that many ppl would want to generated their downloads 
manually. but then we could also ship the generated documentation using 
a nix expression which could be triggered once a day or something 
similar and we would have a decentralized wiki, accessible via git and 
able to generate a offline version of the documentation for download.

i would really love to have that and i could create the styleshee if 
needed so that wiki.nixos.org preserves the nixos.org look which i think 
is quite important.

going away from mediawiki is a good thing to say the least.

regards,
joachim