[PLUG] wikis breaking on updates (was: Re: Upgrage Breaks MediaWiki - why?)

[John Sechrest]

I wonder how far you would get by asking Bard or chatgpt or one of the
other AI things to translate Python 2 to current python....


On Mon, Jul 31, 2023 at 5:31 PM Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at portlandia-it.com>
wrote:

>
> > a dead-end solution with a future of pain, fragility, and
> >(probably) unpatched security vulnerabilities while people scramble to
> find
> and implement a solution (that may no >longer exist within even a
> reasonable
> set of parameters).
>
> I feel compelled to point out that if people spent half the time simply
> paying a software programmer to upgrade the codebase of these projects that
> they spend complaining about the projects becoming dead end, that they
> would
> have updated projects that work for a tenth of the price that Micro$oft
> wants them to pay for windows versions of things.
>
> How many hundreds if not thousands of wikis on the Internet that use
> Moinmoin have ever just considered posting a message "We just upgraded to
> Debian Bullseye and we get 10 compiler errors when attempting to build
> Moinmoin on it.  $5000 to the first person who fixes that and produces a
> functioning binary, and feeds the changes back into the public source"
>
> OR, how many of them have picked up a compiler and tried their hand at
> fixing it themselves?
>
> Ted
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: PLUG [mailto:plug-bounces at pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Paul Heinlein
> Sent: Monday, July 31, 2023 8:38 AM
> To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug at pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] wikis breaking on updates (was: Re: Upgrage Breaks
> MediaWiki - why?)
>
> On Sun, 30 Jul 2023, Russell Senior wrote:
>
> > A slightly related story: Debian's wiki is moinmoin. Moinmoin v1.x is
> > based on python 2. Python2 is (of course) deprecated and pretty much
> > abandoned as of Debian Bullseye. It seems somewhat ironic that the
> > wiki that proudly announces Debian 12 (bookworm) as of July 22, has to
> > run Debian 10 (buster, i.e. oldoldstable) because that's the last
> > version that supports python2 enough to run the wiki.
> >
> >
> > https://u35970666.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=TqJK0v-2BTL1dmkjS-2FZRB
> > wGRDG4t3PuCk88LFqqcTvyYGDJGeFNIjwU8pGkcA3tIrkXxPogHNGRue04tX0s41yELyVT
> > 2kQTzNKeJ1a3JRIU5c-3DkyL0_VIYZ4N8dmyIPGy7Y8nsPO1q5dom4O0HMDO1WKXG4iy6c
> > RPYqUFHozao-2Fpbo-2BoZqOchXuKORABSzW180gWYBHeRPNrdK7edxBEXDVaeFmkWm4xn
> > UhizY9EOtln7Mj8LEiArb78-2BbHAD0AsaSTK9AWj1JB0cOk7hkn-2BvgslB0tXdYqMV8B
> > ZkiZeBlgfBwozTDycTSoXvNA4kNrtVykLP6PwQ-3D-3D
> >
> > I have a particularly acute awareness of this because Personal Telco's
> > wiki also uses moinmoin, and it stopped working when I tried to update
> > to Debian 11 (bullseye) about a year ago. We had a brief outage while
> > I figured out what had gone wrong.
>
> This is a sadly familiar story. A high-level software package depends on
> dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lower-level language runtimes, libraries, and
> even utilities. One or more of those lower-level packages gets deprecated,
> drops features, becomes orphaned, or simply doesn't keep up with the rest
> of
> the dependency ecosystem.
>
> Voila -- a dead-end solution with a future of pain, fragility, and
> (probably) unpatched security vulnerabilities while people scramble to find
> and implement a solution (that may no longer exist within even a reasonable
> set of parameters).
>
> I feel vaguely guilty every time I say it, but if computers were easy I
> wouldn't have a job.
>
> --
> Paul Heinlein
> heinlein at madboa.com
> 45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
>
>

-- 
--
[image: www.seattleangelconference.com]
<http://www.seattleangelconference.com/>

*JOHN SECHREST*
*Founder, *Seattle Angel Conference
TEL  (541) 250-0844    EMAIL  sechrest at seattleangel.com
Schedule A Meeting <http://sechrest.youcanbookme.com/>

http://seattleangelconference.com
@nwangelconf

An Investor driven event bringing together new investors and new
entrepreneurs to expand the startup ecosystem.