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

[Ben Koenig]

------- Original Message -------
On Tuesday, August 1st, 2023 at 1:06 AM, Russell Senior <russell at pdxlinux.org> wrote:


> 
> On 7/31/23 23:15, Ben Koenig wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> The wikipedia entry says "a steamed or boiled bean pudding".
> 
> I think what actually happened is that v1.x achieved a kind of stability
> and it basically didn't change for a decade and the people who knew how
> it worked kind of wandered away. It was only the abandonment of python2
> that has led to the "crisis". There has been a slow moving effort to
> build a v2 of MoinMoin, but it's reportedly not ready for production, or
> wasn't when I looked last (again, about a year ago).
> 
> 
> --
> Russell Senior
> russell at pdxlinux.org


Probably. python2.7 isn't exactly broken or bad, just unmaintained. There are a lot of projects that just don't see a benefit from moving to python3. A lot of internet keyboard warriors like to act like you just need a project manager and some financial incentive to make the change, but no that's just not how it works. 

Even I've soured on python because of this. By the time I get used to the way things work, stuff changes and my code breaks. 
-Ben