[Nix-dev] wiki and utf-8 characters

[phreedom at yandex.ru]

On Пятница 22 марта 2013 13:13:51 Joachim Schiele wrote:
> On 03/22/2013 10:43 AM, "Marc Weber <marco-oweber at gmx.de>
> 
> To:"@science.uu.nl wrote:
> >> thing to maintain, especially with a database like mysql. the
> >> wiki.nixos.org uses postgresql as backend.
> > 
> > Why is a database of that size hard to maintain using MySQL?
> 
> i don't like mysql and php that's all. and since wiki.nixos.org is only
> used by about ~ppl we could also use other systems which for example do
> not have a database at all.
> 
> > MySQL is used that much that it should have no trouble coping with such
> > a small wiki. Eventually some care has to be taken to set fields to
> > utf-8 collation - but the media wiki should take care of that.
> > In the end a wiki is a key value store and a search.
> 
> i maintain several mediawiki instances and i always had a lot of trouble
> with updating the mysql databases using the admin script coming with new
> mediawiki releases. and the utf8 stuff is one of such things i had to
> fix in the past.
> 
> >> going away from mediawiki is a good thing to say the least.
> > 
> > Again - tell us why you feel that way :)
> 
> - if we would be using something with git and mdwn we could make an
> offline version of the wiki pretty easy and ship it with nixpkgs
> - also offline editing would be a good thing IMHO

Offline editing is very convenient. If you ever try it, you'll never want to 
come back to the regular http ways :)

Kate(and perhaps other editors and IDEs) know popular wiki markups, so you 
don't even need to render html in many cases.

What would be interesting to know is how many useful edits were done by people 
outside of the devs with commit access? How many edits were done by people who 
would have trouble submitting a merge request?

Either way, ikiwiki does work if you need anonymous editing via http. Also, 
migration betwen different git-based wikis is very simple compared to db-based 
ones.

Making an offline version and shipping it with nixpkgs is as easy as storing the 
wiki in a nixpkgs subdir and a simple derivation can take care of building the 
static html version.