On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 11:06:35AM +0200, Alejandro Forero Cuervo wrote:
When I moved all users in the wiki from /foo to /users/foo, I took the
time to create symlinks from the old locations to the new, so that
people using the old URLs would be automatically redirected to the
right (new) location. People would gradually update their bookmarks
and search engines would gradually notice that things have moved and
everything would be fine and dandy.
Gradually would imply that eventually everything would indeed be moved.
A look at the Trac timeline tells me that these symlinks have been there
for over 5 months. How much longer do you intend to keep them around?
Perhaps forever. :-)
That's exactly what I was afraid you were really trying to say! ;)
I would prefer if we could move the wiki forward and keep it clean
instead of keeping all this old cruft around.
I'm sorry that I did not reply immediately to your proposals.
I have many things that I need to keep up with in my life that are
significantly more important to me than the layout of the Chicken
wiki. For instance, in the last 3 weeks I had extremely limited
internet access. That said, I don't think this should prevent me from
pointing out things that I consider broken in a way that affects me in
the layout of the Chicken wiki.
I don't understand how having limited internet access in the last 3
weeks is relevant to your being able to read a message on this list
two months ago. Also, you sent an email to this very list a short while
after all these changes stating you were going to move away from
Chicken's repository wiki, so you must have seen _something_ that
prompted you to make this decision.
In the end, if a decision is made and work is done, I'm sure you
understand it's not very pleasant to hear someone complaining about this
fact months later and asking to revert it partly.
Also, the
wiki provides no way to see and manage these symlinks as far as I know,
which means that everytime someone creates or deletes a user page
through the wiki interface, someone needs to go in and fix the symlinks.
I am *not* proposing keeping these in touch (ie. everytime someone
creates or deletes a user page, go in and fix the symlinks). I'm
simply proposing that if something used to be accessible at /foo and
is now accessible at /bar/foo, we create a link at /foo to /bar/foo
*unless there is a reason to use /foo for something else*. I'm *not*
proposing that if we create a new page at /bar/foo, we create the /foo
symlink.
That's even more confusing to newcomers. What's the canonical URL of a
userpage? What happens when a userpage is deleted? Why do we have two
URLs pointing to the same thing? What happens if someone decides to
rename his userpage (for whatever reason)?
Remember, you cannot see the symlinks from the wiki interface, you have
to make a checkout for that. This means newcomers will only see the
confusing behaviour of having some userpages available under two URLs,
and some not.
I agree that cleanning this up is good. However, I would also claim
that just keeping the symlinks around doesn't really hurt anyone. One
can simply ask for a view with symlinks removed to get exactly the
same uncluttered view we have now. However, having the symlinks to
old pages keeps old URLs/links working. So I see very little gain in
just removing the symlinks.
From a pure filesystem perspective, perhaps. But from a wiki
perspective, see above.
For example, searching for mario domenech goulart on Google
lists http://chicken.wiki.br/mario%20domenech%20goulart as the
second result. This result used to work, redirecting to the
correct page. Now it takes you to a stupid edit form.
Yes, and keeping it around will ensure Google never updates its links.
We just have to wait a little longer and it will come around and
update its links.
I do not think this process, that everything will be automatically
fixed, will be as effective and take as little time as I think you
think it will. :-(
Well, I'm not sure about that but I have seen that Google generally tends
to pick things up reasonably quickly.
This same comments applies to URLs for eggs and for manual pages and
everything else. For example, all the URLs for all my eggs in the
Chicken wiki were just broken when someone decided to move /egg-foo to
/eggref/N/egg-foo without providing symlinks. Now most links to the
documentation for my eggs are broken. Perhaps link /egg to
/eggref/N/egg, where N is the latest version for which it is
available?
It is very easy to do: whenever you move file foo to bar/foo, add a
symlink in foo pointing to bar/foo to the svn repos. That's all that
is needed: the current infrastructure will act accordingly. You don't
even need access to the server or any additional insight about how all
this stuff works to automate this.
This is inconsistent with what you
