To /wiki or not to /wiki

This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156) --------------enigC8E4F86EC68CDC79652F507D Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable This is the best place for this discussion ... sort of.[1] This topic is slightly complex, I'll sort things here in to some sections to help. =3D=3D Background =3D=3D With MediaWiki serving www.ovirt.org, that means we will be redirecting away from (and no longer using) wiki.ovirt.org. MW is going to provide the top-level pages, and standard MW configuration is to have everything appear after /wiki. It is not impossible to change this, but it has 3 main caveats: 1. Some stuff is going to be a bit harder - we have to resolve robots.txt and favicon.ico as not wiki articles, for example.[2] 2. We may get occasional bugs that people who use /wiki won't get. 3. mediawiki.org says, "this is not supported by the MediaWiki developers. So if your scheme doesn't work with a new MediaWiki version, you're on your own." Relevant sources: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_in_site_root_directory http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL/Apache =3D=3D Options =3D=3D A. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/wiki/Page_name B. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/w/Page_name C. All site URLs are in the form of http://ovirt.org/Page_name =3D=3D My opinion =3D=3D I like option C - I want to see clean URLs that hide implementation detai= ls. My opinion on those concerns about upstream: that's open source. It's hard to do anything without having problems unique or rare due to your circumstances, getting bugs that others don't see who follow the out-of-the-box installation, and to wonder if you won't be able to get community support for the unusual configuration. As it happens, we've been running MediaWiki for the last year using the EPEL RPM -- which is not supported by the MediaWiki developers. When I went last Fall looking for help with something, #mediawiki told me to get rid of the RPM and use the ZIP instead, then come back for help. (The package maintainer (smooge) has been helpful in all cases instead, so I've been able to avoid having to go to the upstream developers for help again.) We have no guarantee that MediaWiki developers will support the OpenShift quickstart. It also does not use the ZIP out-of-the-box install, so it likely is unsupported. My conclusion here is, personally, I have to not care that we're going to be unsupported, since being supported is actually worse. (I'd rather run unsupported with a good RPM than supported with an unsigned ZIP.) Links from anywhere in the site that point to "the wiki" should point to a landing page e.g. [[OVirt wiki]] that organizes the pages on the wiki, exposing popular categories, etc. Thus, "the wiki" is not identified by a specific URL, it is identified by the type of content on the page - is it intended to be community documentation (a wiki) by it's category. =3D=3D Footnotes =3D=3D [1] I want to acknowledge as we start that part of Garrett's expertise that he brings to oVirt is the human-computer interface skillset. That may not be a skill that many others of us on this list have. Are there some folks in the rest of oVirt development we can invite to this discussion? UI or UX folks, for example? The reason why this matters is we want to separate our geeky-preferences from the way things tend to work best for a broad range of humans. For example, I love sub-domains, they work well for my brain - I'm so much happier with lists.ovirt.org/mailman/... than www.ovirt.org/mailman... But if Garrett told me that is not the best way to present the information for a wide audience, I would have to give that opinion high credence. Heck, I'm prepared to do some pretzel twists to make it happen, based on that. (I've also always secretly loathed that MediaWiki has the /wiki requirement.) [2] I suspect we can special-case them in the .htaccess file. --=20 Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth http://TheOpenSourceWay.org .^\ http://community.redhat.com @quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC) \v' gpg: AD0E0C41 --------------enigC8E4F86EC68CDC79652F507D Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" --------------enigC8E4F86EC68CDC79652F507D--