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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

$5k dropped on some overseas programming group in India will get you a whole lotta translating!

Ted

-----Original Message-----
From: PLUG [mailto:plug-bounces at pdxlinux.org] On Behalf Of John Sechrest
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2023 5:34 PM
To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <plug at pdxlinux.org>
Subject: Re: [PLUG] wikis breaking on updates (was: Re: Upgrage Breaks MediaWiki - why?)

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-2FZ
> > RB 
> > wGRDG4t3PuCk88LFqqcTvyYGDJGeFNIjwU8pGkcA3tIrkXxPogHNGRue04tX0s41yELy
> > VT 
> > 2kQTzNKeJ1a3JRIU5c-3DkyL0_VIYZ4N8dmyIPGy7Y8nsPO1q5dom4O0HMDO1WKXG4iy
> > 6c 
> > RPYqUFHozao-2Fpbo-2BoZqOchXuKORABSzW180gWYBHeRPNrdK7edxBEXDVaeFmkWm4
> > xn 
> > UhizY9EOtln7Mj8LEiArb78-2BbHAD0AsaSTK9AWj1JB0cOk7hkn-2BvgslB0tXdYqMV
> > 8B 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
>
>

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