added:
From simon Wed Apr 23 21:28:26 -0700 2008
From: simon
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:28:26 -0700
Subject: more discussion thoughts
Message-ID: <20080423212826-0700@zwiki.org>
I remembered more details of the old wiki versus mail-list dilemma.. I had a 12-point memo for you, but lost it in a firefox 3 crash. Basically I have decided to try something else first: stick with the simple all-wiki setup and seek other solutions to the problems I mentioned. Eg:
1. really emphasize GeneralDiscussion as the standard place for discussion, including users, developers, patch review, but excluding extremely specific topics like issues
2. solve the problem of darcs patches cluttering up the page content
Getting started on 1, I archived old discussion, merged the 2008 patch discussion into GeneralDiscussion, cleaned up that page and simplified the FrontPage discussion links. Better! AboutZwikiDiscussion updates later.
This page is the hub of Zwiki discussion, including user support, developer chat, and miscellaneous topics. (There are various topical discussion pages around the wiki, but as of 2008/04 we are trying to gather all regular discussion here, aside from really specific topics, like issues.)
To read, you can
view this page in your web browser;
subscribe to the wiki and use your email client;
or read the zwiki newsgroup in your newsreader.
To post, you can
use the comment form below;
send or reply by email (if subscribed);
or post from your newsreader (if subscribed).
To review old discussion,
use your newsreader,
or the wiki search,
or browse the archived pages at AboutZwikiDiscussion?.
Patches applied to the main Zwiki darcs repo are automatically
announced here. See also the
repo log
and this discussion of code review.
Don't forget the #zwiki IRC channel!
Especially good for troubleshooting and coaching.
greetings --Simon Michael, Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:25:33 -0800 reply
Happy new year all. I've just returned from a visit to Ireland, where I had a wonderful time (visited family, drank guinness in Matt Molloy's, climbed a mountain, stayed in a castle, jumped in a lake to start the new year..)
I haven't been active with Zwiki development for some months, having been focussed on consulting projects, but I am currently working on some sysadmin tasks, which you should know in case there are glitches. I'm moving domains to dyndns and sites to slicehost. Aktiom was good but slicehost looks better; I can run ubuntu gutsy, and I can get eg 512mb ram for $30/mo ($45 with backups). I've just finished configuring apache and breaking up my ancient crufty apache2.conf (hurrah!)
On the new server I hope to be able to host, develop and test more effectively and complete (or burn! :/ ) the all-unicode branch, among other things. We'll see what the year brings for Zwiki and indeed Zope 2, 3, Grok, Plone and all.
I wish you a peaceful and fulfilling 2008! See you online.
greetings --betabug, Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:54:55 -0800 reply
Happy new year and welcome back Simon! Looks like you had a really good time in Ireland! The sysadmin stuff looks promising. Best wishes for a good 2008 from me too!
darcs patch: 1397 - fix revert by re-adding setVotes. --Simon Michael, Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:38:14 -0800 reply
On with the patches!
Thanks for this, applied. I had trouble applying it due to a darcs bug, but pulling it from your repo worked fine. It will go live on zwiki.org when I restart that in a little bit.
darcs patch: Added some functional tests. (and 1 more) --Simon Michael, Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:20:11 -0800 reply
Yay, tests! Applied.
server trouble --simon, Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:47:12 -0800 reply
The server (and all sites) has been restarting much more frequently since the middle of last week. I suspect some new bot traffic. I raised the memory limit a little and am working on the move to a new server.
sites moved --Simon Michael, Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:48:20 +0000 reply
Well, this was the bumpiest upgrade ever.
Sites are now finally running on the new server, after a day or two of downtime. I'm very sorry about the outage to the wikis. I assumed this move would be straightforward, didn't realize I was dealing with a new apache version, rushed it, got busy offline, and had to dig quite hard to find what was causing sites to hang after a couple of requests (a combination of apache and zope config issues).
I now have 512M of ram to play with (up from 256) and a modern ubuntu gutsy system. All sites should be running better than before, aside from a few remaining things being resolved (darcsweb). Other problem reports are welcome. I'll be doing more tuning as needed.
So, basically, good news! Thanks and happy new year to all!
outage --simon, Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:11:42 -0800 reply
The server was down this morning due to a failure of memory-limiting and mail notification scripts. Sorry about that.
... --User123, Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:54:33 -0800 reply
Requirement is like a user from one machine should access the documents uploaeed on zwiki which located on some another machine..(might be on server machine ).Could you give me early pointers.
translation process --simon, Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:59:19 -0800 reply
FYI: I just cleaned up and proposed a new translation process at http://zwiki.org/I18n . If you're interested in using Zwiki in other languages and maybe contributing a translation or two (it's easy!), I recommend you subscribe to that page to listen in.
darcs patch: replace: subscriberCount, wikiSubscriberCount with: su... --Simon Michael, Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:40:22 -0800 reply
experimenting --simon, Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:58:15 -0800 reply
Experimenting to find a sane process here..
darcs patch: replace: subscriberCount, wikiSubscriberCount with: su... --Simon Michael, Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:00:09 -0800 reply
darcs patch: replace: subscriberCount, wikiSubscriberCount with: su... --simon, Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:24:12 -0800 reply
Applied.
darcs patch: strip some bottom-quoting from mailins --Simon Michael, Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:00:25 -0800 reply
not in Google --geon, Tue, 12 Feb 2008 22:55:35 -0800 reply
Before upgrading to 0.60 our zwiki site was well placed in Google. After upgrading we move somewhere to 100.place :-(. Our unicode signs are wrong reprezented on search result on Google. F.e. insted of "í" there is "Ã". I think it might be due to <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">. Could it be so? Where to change it? Thanks a lot.
applied patch: strip some bottom-quoting from mailins --zwiki-repo, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:31:55 -0800 reply
test 1 --simon, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:42:27 -0800 reply
test 1
applied patch: more CHANGES updates --zwiki-repo, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:07:31 -0800 reply
applied patch: add the nav links to the help page, testing --zwiki-repo, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:23:07 -0800 reply
not in Google --simon, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:16:58 -0800 reply
Hi geon. If that's so, you can change it in one or more templates in ZWiki?/skins/zwiki/.
new patch submission process --simon, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:22:19 -0800 reply
Finally.. after much "fun" with the plumbing, we have an easy patch submission process. Basically, no more patch approval required. The previous process works well for many projects, but it's needlessly heavy for us right now. There was the approval delay and also, the surprising requirement to be subscribed to zwiki.org before you could darcs send a patch.
Now, just darcs send and it goes in immediately. I, and now Sascha, also have direct push/pull access. Either way, commits happen at full speed. Each new patch sends a notification to the PatchDiscussion? page for code review. For security, zwiki.org is now running on a separate, admin-maintained copy of the main repo. Also the server does not run tests for you, so do run tests yourself before sending. The DarcsRepos? docs have been updated accordingly.
Hacking on Zwiki code is now as easy as it should be! Here's hoping for some positive code churn.
applied patch: More functional tests: recentchanges and options --zwiki-repo, Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:33:46 -0800 reply
applied patch: split links macro so we can omit the page-specific nav links on forms --zwiki-repo, Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:23:05 -0800 reply
applied patch: add site navigation links to all forms --zwiki-repo, Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:44:40 -0800 reply
... --zwiki-repo, Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:44:55 -0800 reply
Subject: applied patch: move access key help to help page Message-ID: <20080214204440.3445278001@mail.joyful.com>
Happy Valentine's Day from Zwiki HQ --simon, Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:24:02 -0800 reply
A happy Valentine's day to all!
Continuing with my spring cleaning theme, here are some musings.
Like many of you, I'm always wondering where is the most useful place to spend my community hacking time. Sometimes Zwiki seems like the very best place; other times it doesn't. Development pretty much came to a full stop at times last year. So I'm kicking around some ideas. First, let me get one thing off my chest: Python is a blub! There, I said it. Then there are the recurring questions of project and platform maturity, legacy cruft, how many people actually use this thing, what is the benefit, what's the future potential, etc. Don't get me wrong, I expect Python and Zope 2 to keep growing and succeeding for a very long time. And so I guess Zwiki will continue to be used and perhaps grow in user base. At the current rate of development, though, we will not stay competitive with other software or even catch up with our own bug reports. Looking at current code, I am reminded that Zwiki 0.x is mature, built on early zope 2 architecture, and that cleanup continues to be expensive (compared to starting something fresh).
Of course, many hands make light work. Imagine ten developers working on Zwiki at once - cleanup expense would no longer be noticeable, we could pretty much do whatever we want. That's not our current reality. Is it possible to find ten Zwiki developers now or in future ? I'm sure I could increase our numbers (from two active) by sustained effort, but how far and how smart a strategy that is I don't know.
Another idea which started this post is to branch, mothballing 0.x as-is and moving development focus to a Zwiki 2.x where we would do aggressive disruptive cleanup. Say we did that. What would you throw out of Zwiki 0.x ? What would you keep ?
This is to air my thoughts and also a kind of ping to gauge support for the project circa 2008, I guess. Thanks!
Happy Valentine's Day from Zwiki HQ --tralala, Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:48:22 -0800 reply
I've been asking myself very similar questions about zwiki. I don't think python or zope are a limiting factor, however zope2 seems to encourage the coding of huge classes and zwiki has followed the fashion. I found it difficult to dig into the code and understand the concepts behind.
I believe that using zope3 or five in order to reduce the complexity and improve the readability of the code will help attracting new devs. Additionally for lowering the barrier to entry we should think of putting design documents on zwiki.org - something of a bird eye view of the project, the concepts, the assumptions, the philosophy... you get the idea.
Happy Valentine's Day from Zwiki HQ --jmax, Fri, 15 Feb 2008 09:13:20 -0800 reply
Moving away from big classes is a definite plus. I'm interested in a simpler, more extensible object model; imagine being able to easily subclass wikipage to specialize UI/behaviour for different site applications. Also, just a thought: the current comments system could be chucked out and re-done in a more OO way.
ZWiki? going in earnest to Zope3 would be a motivation for me to take Zope3 seriously; unless ZWiki? goes there, I'm not all that interested, as everything I do with Zope nowadays uses ZWiki? as the platform.
applied patch: add nav links to contents form too --zwiki-repo, Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:52:10 -0800 reply
applied patch: don't break showAccessKeys legacy url --zwiki-repo, Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:52:24 -0800 reply
A Zwiki roadmap --Simon Michael, Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:55:05 -0800 reply
All -
thanks for the interesting feedback on zwiki.org, zope/plone-user lists and #zwiki channel. Based on this I see the following as a good roadmap.
So there is one possible path into the future, though I don't yet know how far down it we'll go. zwiki.org has a hundred subscribers, but I'm not hearing strong support/interest/need. And there are other projects and other implementation strategies to explore. One basic issue is that with wikis proliferating and traffic intensifying, 100%-dynamic, memory-intensive wikis are not always economic. Eg for slashdottings and
for busy developers, an RCS-based solution like ikiwiki is attractive. And so on. Just pondering; we shall see. As always, further thoughts welcome.
-Simon
A Zwiki roadmap --Simon Michael, Sun, 17 Feb 2008 01:06:28 -0800 reply
PS in case you're wondering why I sent that five times - zwiki.org's iptables had started blocking incoming mail connections for some reason. Once I flushed the iptables rules, previous attempts went through.
A Zwiki roadmap --betabug, Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:30:33 -0800 reply
Simon, I think you put it down perfectly. We'd discussed this on #zwiki, and I believe you summed it up very good!
ZWiki?-unstable --simon, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:48:25 -0800 reply
I have pulled all the latest work from main ZWiki? into the ZWiki?-unicode branch, and renamed this to ZWiki?-unstable. Here we'll work on the 2008 roadmap plan I mentioned (linked at FrontPage? -> download box).
The next step is to set up a second zope instance running this, and a wiki. Probably a copy of zwiki.org, to give the unicode stuff a workout.
dev.zwiki.org ? unstable.zwiki.org ?
... --Michael Ang, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:57:50 -0800 reply
dev.zwiki.org is more generic. Any plan to move to svn?
ZWiki?-unstable --simon, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:31:54 -0800 reply
Ok, dev.zwiki.org it is. That site (when up) is running the -unstable code.
Sorry, no plan to move to svn. Heck, I have four better alternatives. I have been talking smack about trying out git, hg or maybe bzr (in that order). I do still love darcs, even though merging those branches was darn slow.
Just now I got a little drastic and tried zwiki.org itself on -unstable, to save time. Things were worse than expected and we backpedalled. But just to warn you, I'm ready to break a few eggs:
<sm> I want to fix, remove, or retire stuff, and without a lot of expensive development time spent on trivia <sm> heck, who uses zwiki.org these days but the bots <sm>everyone who needs to has read it » sm likes this new world of unstable
zwiki.org snapshot --simon, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:45:44 -0800 reply
dev.zwiki.org now has a snapshot of zwiki.org content where we can debug issues.
Please don't link directly to that site, I'd like to keep it bot-free and quiet.
zwiki.org snapshot --betabug, Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:45:48 -0800 reply
Don't forget to put in a robot.txt to exclude all bots there.
What about making the "Roadmap 2008" a proper page here, so we could also put up things like your "micro roadmap" - the one you mentioned on #zwiki for what's to do immediately:
sm notes micro-roadmap: get tests passing in ZWiki-unicode, then pull, resolve & test each patch from ZWiki
zwiki.org snapshot --Simon Michael, Sun, 24 Feb 2008 14:17:15 -0800 reply
I did so (robots.txt). RoadMap2008? ? Good idea, I was thinking the same.
update --Simon Michael, Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:09:00 -0800 reply
Good day all, a quick update:
zeo --simon, Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:56:48 -0700 reply
I have re-enabled ZEO, hoping http://zwiki.org/1358 won't bite.
unicode progress --simon, Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:17:16 -0700 reply
The patches I've just pushed to -unstable include: "a bunch more unicode-related fixes. We can now upgradeAll the content of zwiki.org then serve it without obvious problems (complete cataloging requires unicode-aware indexes)"
This is a good milestone. If you are able, please test the dev.zwiki.org server and if you're brave, test the unstable branch on your own wikis. It does require a manual /upgradeAll to get things working. This will convert everything in your wiki from utf-8 to unicode.
The catalog situation is not bad - both Andreas' TextIndexNG3? and Dieter's ManagableIndex? are unicode aware. The latter provides a keyword index, which we need for the parents field, but I haven't got it working yet. When I do, Zwiki-unstable/unicode/2 should be usable in production..
Getting the upgrade process working - even manually - was not easy at all, because of the enmeshment of updating pages and updating the outline cache. Poor layering/encapsulation. I have been reduced to groping - testing and fixing the issues as I find them - though I do have a reasonable picture of the end goal in my head, eg the boundary line between encoded and unicode text. The unicode conversion is having the expected effect of clarifying architectural problems. Some time soon, new developer docs will emerge and help clarify things further. I'm debating whether to start these in a fresh high-signal Zwiki 2 wiki, or co-exist on zwiki.org (with cleanups).
performance fixes --Simon Michael, Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:53:32 -0700 reply
I looked at some more server slowness today, with the help of emacs, dtach, top, vmstat, tail, highlight-lines-matching-regexp, and Tres Seaver's excellent thrashcatcher product which shows zodb load and store counts for each transaction in the trace log. I applied two fixes which large zwiki sites might want to know about:
bots were finding their way directly to page revision diffs (how ? I don't know), trying every link and causing a lot of unnecessary zodb loads. I stopped it by adding this apache rewrite rule:
# temporary to keep bots out of revisions # redirects direct requests for revisions to the latest page RewriteRule (.*)/revisions/(.*)\.[0-9]+/ $1/$2 [R,L]
visits to old revisions of zwiki.org FrontPage? were generating thousands of page loads every time. The "new pages" dtml snippet on FrontPage? calls pages() to show the last 5 pages, but in the revisions folder this was falling back to a non-catalog search (since there is no catalog there), loading all 2000+ old page revisions into cache. For this reason pages now returns nothing without a properly configured catalog.
drop outline cache ? --simon, Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:03:51 -0700 reply
Zwiki stores the page hierarchy in two places. First, every page keeps a list of its parents, in a parents property. The hierarchy is built from this.
Second - because the above data structure is not rich enough to tell us what we want to know (what are my children ? who are my siblings ? what's the first page in the wiki ?) without thrashing the zodb - we cache the same information in the outline object in the wiki folder. This stores the whole hierarchy in one place so it's easy to query efficiently. The outline object is generated on demand and kept up to date as changes are made in the wiki (in parallel with the parents property).
I'm kicking around the idea of dropping the outline cache and keeping more detailed information on the pages - not only parents, but children and previous/next sibling. The downside of this is a lot of redundancy and (different) opportunities to get out of sync. Also you might have to touch a few more pages than before when making wiki changes. And I suppose we would have to index all these new pointers for efficient queries. The upside seems to be a simpler design that would be easier to self-repair and easier to upgrade. For example it would allow the upgrade to unicode to be handled automatically.
applied patch: make lastLog more robust, prevent occasional page breakage --zwiki-repo, Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:10:48 -0700 reply
applied patch: make plone member email lookup more robust to fix non-mail-out (#1400) --zwiki-repo, Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:14:18 -0700 reply
outline updating query --jmax, Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:19:57 -0700 reply
Ironic, given the above, but...
We at Thinkubator are once again pushing against the traditional. I'm currently working in a system in which a new page can be created and "filed" under multiple parents as part of the creation step. I'm calling create() instead of edit() as it seems to offer the ability to pass a 'parents' argument. And it partially works. The parents are added locally, to the new page's property, but they don't seem to make it into the outline (and hence, to be known to the parents themselves -- imagine being in such a situation!) Now, create() seems to be calling wikiOutline().add(), which ought to do the trick, but, as I say, it isn't, and besides, when I look, I don't see an 'add()' defined anywhere for wikiObject. So... any pointers?
outline updating query --Simon Michael, Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:40:39 -0700 reply
Hi John.. that's a little odd. Maybe you can step through with a debugger and see where it goes wrong ? Or, maybe a call to updateWikiOutline will take care of it ?
ZWiki? pages incorrectly can be added in other people's Members folders --nd51, Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:35:18 -0700 reply
ZWiki? pages incorrectly can be added in other people's Members folders --Simon Michael, Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:51:45 -0700 reply
Sorry.. this one does not sound familiar. If you need it fixed I am available as a consultant at joyful.com, or feel free to ask more questions on #zwiki.
applied patch: fix the plone 3 document actions display glitch - hide them --zwiki-repo, Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:33:55 -0700 reply
fix the plone 3 document actions display glitch - hide them --Simon Michael, Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:37:53 -0700 reply
Quickly unpulled and recorded that one. I'll be releasing a 0.61 from the latest stable repo, which will be the one to use with plone 3.
unsubscribed an address --simon, Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:10:16 -0700 reply
I noticed feedreader at yahoo.com subscribed to all zwiki.org edits, which seemed wrong, so I unsubscribed it. If I'm wrong, please reply.
100 subscribers --simon, Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:15:07 -0700 reply
GeneralDiscussion? has passed 100 subscribers (page + wiki). Hi!
unsubscribed an address --feedreader, Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:39:39 -0700 reply
Simon, if my subscription seems "wrong" maybe I should think again about it... out of respect I mean. But really, it felt OK to me.
Now though it looks as if I don't need to be subscribed to notice that I've been unsubscribed, which gives me some food for thought on the subject of subscription...
unsubscribed an address --Simon Michael, Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:42:19 -0700 reply
Hi Ken, sorry about that. So is that your personal address ? I thought it was someone trying to pipe all edit mails into some kind of yahoo feed monitoring thing.
Neat. :) Maybe you're subscribed with another address ?
applied patch: the bones of 0.61 release notes --zwiki-repo, Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:27:33 -0700 reply
unstable repo cleaned up! --simon, Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:53:22 -0700 reply
I have been reviewing and consolidating branches on my local machine, zwiki.org, and wiki.zope.org, and have resolved a showstopping darcs speed issue. Pushing between the stable and unstable repos had become impractical due to the large number of conflicts I created when merging unicode and skin cleanup branches. With the help of #darcs I understood this better and re-recorded those as two conflict-free mega-patches, for a cleaner and quicker unstable repo. Also the unstable repo is now in darcs 2's backwards-compatible hashed format.
This means:
a mailing list! --simon, Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:13:33 -0700 reply
I think I am going to set up an honest-to-god mailing list again, to make our discussions easier. Surviving on our own dogfood is good, but I want to remove that constant "where do I post this ?" friction, and also to review and discuss darcs patches easily the way other projects do (these do not travel well through wiki mail). I can set up a Zwiki team and mail list in our Launchpad project, and reuse the old zwiki gmane group. Comments ?
We'll need to figure out (anew! :) the most useful ways to integrate wiki and list, and what to do with existing page and wiki subscribers. I think think it would good to retire the GeneralDiscussion? page and move all subscribers to the mail list. I suspect that would require everyone to join the Zwiki team on launchpad though. That might be a showstopper, actually.
more discussion thoughts --simon, Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:28:26 -0700 reply
I remembered more details of the old wiki versus mail-list dilemma.. I had a 12-point memo for you, but lost it in a firefox 3 crash. Basically I have decided to try something else first: stick with the simple all-wiki setup and seek other solutions to the problems I mentioned. Eg:
Getting started on 1, I archived old discussion, merged the 2008 patch discussion into GeneralDiscussion?, cleaned up that page and simplified the FrontPage? discussion links. Better! AboutZwikiDiscussion? updates later.