This week (on GNU's birthday no less) gNewSense got a new website. It's green, it's shiny, it's rounded, it's powerful and the information on there is still freely licensed. The latter is because that information didn't really change, it just sits on top of a new backend now.
Why did we need a new website? Well, the old one was based on PmWiki. It had the advantage of providing an all in one solution: wiki (with separate www and wiki sections), forum and bug tracker. Text-based storage is nice and it supports pretty powerful wiki markup. But after a while it started to strain under the weight of our data. Our freedom verification efforts (which created a wiki page for every file in Linux) probably had something to do with it. Eventually we lost search capability and a few weeks ago the forum also collapsed.
By that time a new wiki system (MoinMoin) had been chosen and work was under way to migrate everything over. After an embarrassing attempt of myself at writing a migration tool, the awesome Michael Fötsch took over to produce a work of art.
The implementation went something like this:
- Patch PmWiki to produce XML instead of HTML, so as not to lose the semantics of the wiki syntax input.
- Write a script (yay, Python) to convert that XML to MoinMoin wiki syntax.
- Patch MoinMoin to accept PmWiki's password hashes.
- Install MoinMoin and run the migration script.
The actual process was a bit more involved, of course. It resulted in a compleet move of the website, including all revisions of all pages. Quite an accomplishment if you ask me. A few things we didn't migrate:
- Kernel freedom verification pages: nobody worked on it anymore, partly because it's utterly boring work, partly because Linux-libre exists now (although we don't use that in deltah).
- Forum: PmWiki's forum was very basic and we probably could do something similar on MoinMoin, but migrating the data would have been too much work (the forum used a special feature that was not implemented in Michael's script).
- Bug tracker: we've been using Savannah for some time now. While PmWiki's BTS module could arguably called a bug tracker, MoinMoin's way of tracking bugs just sucks.
Now go admire the new website. If you hadn't done so already, create an account (old accounts can still be used with no effort on your part) and start adding documentation, translating or editing typos. If you see anything weird that you think might have been introduced with the migration, please let us know as soon as possible.
