On 03/29/2012 07:04 PM, Suresh Marru wrote:
On Mar 29, 2012, at 12:10 PM, Franklin, Matthew B. wrote:
I'm going to open a request for creating a MoinMoin wiki instance at
http://wiki.apache.org/rave
Is MoinMoin the choice? It's fine by me, but I thought that Confluence was
requested by someone...
Hmm, maybe I jumped too quick to a conclusion?
I did propose creating a MoinMoin wiki after graduation on the roadmap
discussion, if nobody objected...
The only feedback I got was a +1 from Matt [1] :)
And earlier there was a request to use Confluence [2] from William Hayes.
I did provide some feedback [3] then giving my hesitation on using Confluence,
based on declining usage (at ASF) and INFRA preferences, as well as my own.
I've used both and while Confluence is 'great', I personally prefer MoinMoin
because it is simpler, more lightweight (also on INFRA), open source, and IMO
can do most/everything we should need, including security management [4].
A I also dislike Confluence very much for one specific reason (see below).
However we did not formally vote on this as I assumed lazy consensus.
If someone from our PMC strongly prefers going with Confluence however and
revert the creation of wiki.apache.org/rave (as it already is up), better say so
now before we actually start using it... Migration from one to the other
probably always can be done also later but I've no idea of the amount of effort.
I do not have the right insights to comment on both the wiki's but I have
noticed confluence has the some extra benefits which might come handy:
* Integration with JIRA - I am not sure how ASF deployment is setup, but I have
seen projects who effectively use these two to compliment each other.
I'm not sure either. The benefit probably would be that you don't need to type a
full JIRA issue url, only its key and Confluence will resolve it. But I don't
know if that actually works in the ASF case. At any rate, I don't care much for
that benefit as we have the same 'problem' with email, website CMS, etc. anyway.
* We can have public write access as well as subset of pages with write access
to commuters only.
This actually can be (and should be) done with MoinMoin too, see [4] for some
info.
This way if we are having some documentation pages as part of the releases,
Note: ASF INFRA, as of Nov. 1 2011, no longer support/allow (auto) exporting
Confluence to static content to be merged in the main website see [5]
And I strongly dislike having documentation considered important enough to be
'released' *not* also and primarily/leading on our website itself.
I easily and quick envision a decline on quality and effort there otherwise.
So -1 from me on that one...
the committer contributed content is already covered by ICLA.s.
Others (who do not have a ICLA on file) can comment on these restricted pages
without directly editing them and we can take the comments and update the pages.
This also can be done through MoinMoin, but IMO we should (only) allow this
through an ContributerGroup [4] which *we* easily can maintain ourselves (on
page-by-page basis if so desired).
Confluence user management however required more karma and is less trivial to
configure in this respect.
Others who have used both wiki's to a greater extent might be a better judge on
recommending one over the other.
There is one specific 'feature' of Confluence I particularly hate although
others might not care much for it: its *inability* to provide nested page urls
nor allows same-named pages within one Space [6] (which ends up being the same
issue).
To me this really is a major issue as you can't build nice and logical url
structures for the wiki content as everything is 'collapsed' in a single url
folder. Try to make two 'Overview' pages in one Confluence (for different
sub-topics)... You'll end up constructing page names like <Topic>Overview,
instead of /topic/Overview.
MoinMoin does support the latter and is trivial to make use of, see [7] for an
example.
And Confluence is never going to fix this: [6] has been open since 2005 and has
'just' been closed as 'Won't Fix'...
Read the Atlassian status at the end of that issue description (1 Nov. 2011).
Seven years of waiting ... and then nothing :(
--Suresh
[1] http://markmail.org/message/ruftsbz3j65ifrey
[2] http://markmail.org/message/xou33iugeh2tx474
[3] http://markmail.org/message/s2mqhn5iz5l2jezq
[4] http://wiki.apache.org/general/OurWikiFarm
[5]
https://cwiki.apache.org/CWIKI/#Index-Canweusetheautoexportsiteaspartofourmainwebsite%3F
[6] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-2524
[7]
http://wiki.apache.org/portals/Jetspeed2/PluggableEngineComponents/CoreEngineComponents/PortalConfiguration
