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

Ben Koenig techkoenig at protonmail.com
Tue Aug 1 06:15:22 UTC 2023


I wonder why WINE, FFMPEG, the Linux Kernel, all mainstream distros...

- KDE
- GNOME
- XFCE
- QT
- GTK

and many other projects DO NOT have this problem, despite all of them being infinitely more complex than a collection of python scripts.

The longterm success and/or failure of any software project comes down to the maintainability of the codebase. Projects with good, clean codebases get more love because the cost of contributing is much lower. Given how many big projects use moinmoin I think it's safe to say that nobody has bothered to fix it because it's a hot fucking mess.

FWIW... $5000 for a 2to3 conversion of moinmoin is a fucking insult to the developer who ends up doing all the work. But if Debian needs a modern system to run their moinmoin wiki I'd be happy to set them up with a Slackware 15.0 installation with python2.7.
-Ben


------- Original Message -------
On Monday, July 31st, 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
> 


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