To /wiki or not to /wiki

Wed Nov 14 16:41:01 UTC 2012

On 11/14/2012 08:33 AM, Vinzenz Feenstra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> What about using .htaccess or URL rewrite for solving this?

Thanks, yes, that is the way we handle the change technically. With
OpenShift we'll use a .htaccess file.

The question here is more of "should we make that change".

Currently, the wiki follows the MediaWiki recommended format of having
/wiki in the URL.

- Karsten

> regards,
> 
> On 11/14/2012 05:18 PM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> == Background ==
>>
>> 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
>>
>> == Options ==
>>
>> 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
>>
>> == My opinion ==
>>
>> I like option C - I want to see clean URLs that hide implementation
>> details.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> == Footnotes ==
>>
>> [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.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Infra at ovirt.org
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Analyst - Community Growth
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org  .^\  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'  gpg: AD0E0C41

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