[darcs-users] Converting MoinMoin to Markdown/RST

[Gwern Branwen]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Trent W. Buck  wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 09:43:25PM -0500, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA512
>>
>> 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.
>
> For this we'll need to talk to a moinmoin person.  But I'd feel much
> better about doing that than throwing away history (step 4 below).
>
>> > 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
>> ?
>
> Just so.

But before we actually move on the main wiki, I think it'd be valuable
to get the Darcs Weekly News up as a wiki first. That's a much simpler
task, and would offer a lot of useful experience as a small trial.
Plus, the DWN is already a darcs repo so the risk is minimal.

- --
gwern
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

iEYEAREKAAYFAkl/G/cACgkQvpDo5Pfl1oK3bACdEkUlJsBvnW1rwKovNGICW480
Oq4AnRqEJnJbUJOOS1i94NuzVho+8zjo
=mYRZ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----