[darcs-users] Converting MoinMoin to Markdown/RST

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Trent W. Buck  wrote:
> Gwern Branwen  writes:
>
>>> I'm not impressed by markdown, but by all accounts pandoc (and thus
>>> gitit) has an extended markdown implementation and a crippled reST
>>> implementation, so within the scope of gitit, I guess the difference is
>>> not so staggering.
>>
>> I dunno how crippled the RST is (I wouldn't expect it to be too
>> crippled since it's so close to Markdown), but it's a reasonable
>> subset - I didn't see any of the DWN RST files break horribly when I
>> looked via Pandoc.
>
> Well just as a simple example, I'm not aware of any standard[0] markdown
> equivalent to recognize the use of metadata in the document prelude and
> propagate to the output document, e.g.:
>
>
>    $ rst2pdf | with-temp-file pdfinfo
>    Tron: The Musical
>    =================
>
>    :Author: Alan Bradley
>    :Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1988 12:22:22 +1100
>
>    Main content
>    ^D
>
> Emits:
>
>    Title:          Tron: The Musical
>    Subject:        (unspecified)
>    Keywords:
>    Author:         Alan Bradley
>    Producer:       ReportLab http://www.reportlab.com
>    CreationDate:   Tue Jan 27 12:22:50 2009
>    Tagged:         no
>    Pages:          1
>    Encrypted:      no
>    Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
>    File size:      3427 bytes
>    Optimized:      no
>    PDF version:    1.3
>
> Running the same input through "rst2html | sed -n '//,/
>
>
>        http://docutils.sourceforge.net/" />
>    Tron: The Musical
>
>
>
>
> Sure, you can live without such niceties, but I'd prefer not to.
>
> [0] I say "standard" because it's possible that pandoc's markdown
>    extensions cover this particular example in a non-portable
>    (i.e. specific to pandoc) way.
>
>>> +1.  I believe I have adequate sed-fu to handle the majority of
>>> differences.  There *will* be edge cases, and we can resolve these
>>> by hand.
>>
>> Cool, so are you going to create the script?
>
> I intend to do it on an ad-hoc basis once we dump the existing files
> (and preferably, change history) into a darcs repo backed onto gitit.

I think getting the MoinMoin history into gitit may be overly
ambitious, unless you've found some clever way of doing it.

> We could ease this transition by making moinmoin still available during
> this time, but only in a read-only fashion.

That seems sensible. So the procedure would be:
1) set MoinMoin read-only
2) take a dump of all its files
3) create, at an alternative URL, a new gitit repo and start it running
4) copy all the MoinMoin files into the repo, and do a mass 'darcs add
&& record'
5) Take whatever script you've cooked up and run it over all the files
6) Probably do some mass renamings as well (to get a .page suffix,
maybe unCamelCase, etc.)
7) Eventually shut down the MoinMoin server and move the gitit wiki to
the original URL
?

- --
gwern
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