Content audit of wiki.devuan.org
There's a bunch of wikis installed here already, so my first task is to audit the server, see where the actual content is. Then herd them together. First measure the size and shape of the mess, then decide how to clean it up, then clean it up.
One part of the mess is the mess that wiki markup syntax is, there are lots of them. Some conversion will be needed.
PmWiki
The wiki currently being used. m1k3 set it up. Not in Devuan package repos.
Uses it's own wiki syntax. They have various ways of dealing with other syntaxes, all but one of them converting TO PmWiki. The one that converts to something else actually converts the HTML to MarkDown. The only package in the Devuan repos that even mentions PmWiki is a module for a system that does exactly that, converts from HTML to PmWiki.
So far a few of us have added a little bit of actual content.
/opt/pmwiki has the wiki software and the content.
pmwiki-2.3.38 is the version we have according to /opt/pmwiki/scripts/version.php, which is the latest version.
Foswiki
The previous one. It's still setup, but the web server currently redirects to PmWiki. Not in Devuan package repos.
It has what looks like a bunch of content. I'll read through it.
rrq saved the content that chomwitt wrote in a separate folder. chomwitt confirmed that they are rewriting some of that content, coz they are in a writing mood.
Foswiki forked from TWiki, and later changed their markup syntax from the TWiki one. Their new one is TopicMarkupLanguage or TML.
Ah TikiWiki is not TWiki, and ours is TML not TWiki syntax. On the other hand, looks like TWiki was tried first in 2020.
Have yet to find any TML to other syntax converters.
/opt/Foswiki has the wiki software and the content. There's also a backups in /opt.
Foswiki 2.1.7 - 28 Mar 2022 is what we have. 06 Aug 2023 Foswiki 2.1.8 is latest that includes security fixes.
"Foswiki is a fork from TWiki 4.2.3"
Hmm, the XWiki and Solr stuff might be part of Foswiki, it uses Solr for search.
Several wikis where tried before they decided on Foswiki, likely explains some of the remnants I'm finding.
https://foswiki.org/Extensions/MarkdownPlugin tells me that it can use pandoc to support the various markup flavors. Edited in the flavour, stored in that flavour, converted to HTML not converted to TML.
MediaWiki
/var/lib/mysql/mediawiki exists. There's evidence that MySQL and MariaDB where installed, as was PostgreSQL. Ah looks like it's MariaDB with a MySQL compatability layer. None of those are running now. The mediawiki database is empty.
Ah it was a short attempt to install MediaWiki in 2021, which is when the switch to Foswiki happened.
MediaWiki is in the Devuan repos.
XWiki
/var/lib/xwiki exists, doesn't seem to have any actual content, but I haven't yet dug further to see if that's elsewhere. This might just be the XWiki markup syntax for something else, or it's the XWiki syntax for the XWiki system.
Looks like it was an attempt to install tomcat in 2021, which was then reverted.
XWiki is not in the Devuan repos.
TWiki
Looks like this was the first one tried on wiki.devuan.org in 2020.
TWiki is not in the Devuan repos.
DocuWiki FriendsOfDevuan
This appears to be gone. I went there, saw what looked like an advert for an Indonesian lottery system, and nothing else. I didn't investigate further. Maintain eye contact, back away slowly.
They used DocuWiki. Not in Devuan package repos.
I did manage to find a backup copy of the page I had there on my desktop. Onefang.ThroughTheLookingGlass is that page that I manually converted from whatever markup syntax was used there.
/opt/foswiki/data/Sandbox/ThingsFromTheOldWiki,pfv/1 is a list of the documents from "TheOldWiki", the one I wrote for FriendsOfDevuan is listed. rrq says there's a tgz of FriendsOfDevuan content, didn't find it.
Tentative conclusion.
While there's still some minor digging to do, I'm not expecting any surprises.
There are two wiki's installed on wiki.devuan.org that have useful content. Foswiki, which was recently replaced by PmWiki. PmWiki is the one currently running. Foswiki has more content. Both suffer from vendor lock in, no way to migrate the content directly to some other syntax. There's plenty of third party tools that can convert the rendered HTML pages to several common syntaxes, and some tools to convert common syntaxes to Foswiki and PmWiki syntaxes.
Foswiki was the result of some testing and team decision making. PmWiki was a one man band taking over, then vanishing and leaving us with this mess I just audited.
A much older wiki was run by a user on their own systems using DocuWiki. We where sent a backup, we haven't found the backup yet, but some parts of it might have been manually imported to Foswiki.
I think we should switch back to Foswiki.
Other things to deal with later that I stumbled across.
While it's currently using nginx, apache was used in the past, and there's evidence Caddy was to. Clean those up.
MariaDB is installed, there's one empty database in it. Not sure yet if that was some sort of requirement for one of the wiki systems, but it's not currently running, so PmWiki at least doesn't need it.
Brightness is installed. lol
What's next?
After this audit, the next step is to herd together all content I find on the server.
First decision is - which wiki system to use for the results?
Should be something where converting what ever existing formats to something it can use is easyish.
Perhaps the one with the most existing content, so less to convert.
Also important would be the ability to export it's content to popular markup syntaxes. There's reasons why we abandoned those old wiki systems, some of those reasons might still be valid. So what ever system falls out of this audit as the one to use right now is just gonna be temporary while we do a proper review and choose of a new wiki system. Then it'll be my responsibility to migrate to the newness. Or we can stick with whatever works after this audit'n'herd, then fix up it's problems.
Naturally it looks like pandoc, my usual weapon of choice for converting between lots of random text formats, doesn't know PmWiki or Foswiki syntaxes. sigh
Package audit of wiki.devuan.org
The system is currently chimaera, with proposed-updates and backports, I should dist-upgrade it to daedalus. It has now been dist-upgraded.
Since several wikis where installed to test them, there might be some cruft packages left over that are no longer needed. So audit those, see what can be uninstalled before the upgrade.
Alas etckeeper wasn't being used, makes it harder to see what changed. It looks like bits of foswiki config in /etc have been removed.
Cpan is installed, and likely used for Foswiki. So have to check that to. Think I saw some pip, virtualenv is installed.
A few libraries got installed from backports.
Quick list of what probably can be uninstalled
apache2-bin, apache2-dev, apache2-ssl-dev, apache2-utils, debian-faq, default-mysql-server, grub-common, laptop-detect, mariadb-client-10.5, mariadb-client-core-10.5, mariadb-common, mariadb-server-10.5, mariadb-server-core-10.5, mysql-common, ncal, os-prober, telnet, usbutils
wamerican is installed, could add wbritish and wcanadian.
grub isn't needed for this subhost, no kernel anywhere, only grub-common installed not grub itself. Removing grub-common removed os-prober as well, I expected that.
Don't think this is a laptop, so don't need laptop-detect.
I left the MariaDB stuff, as that might be needed. ncal I'm not sure why that's there, so left it.
What has been done
The PmWiki stuff should still work as well as it did. There is now a Markdown button at the bottom, which will render the page as Markdown syntax, then show that to you. Up to you to copy it elsewhere.
Foswiki is still being worked on. Foswiki and PmWiki really don't get along, I had to split it off to it's own temporary domain.
The temporary Foswiki is running on the same server. It has been updated to the latest version. You might even be able to log on.
Created infrastructure and automation scripting for the combined system. The result can be seen here https://nyaw.wiki.devuan.org/index.HTML
The common markup can later be converted into almost anything by pandoc, and modules can be added to Foswiki and PmWiki to import that common markup syntax. Pandoc is needed anyway as the only way to export content from either system is to pass the resulting HTML through pandoc to create the common markup syntax. Which is messy, but works. It's also the way that PmWiki to Markdown conversion works, third party module that scrapes the HTML that PmWiki outputs, then converts the HTML to Markdown.
See Wiki roadmap for the roadmap I want to follow for the future.