On Thu, 11 Oct 2018, at 8:30 AM, siggi (siggi@...) wrote:
From my point of view (as normal user) searching in the new WIKI (my primary use case) is a big step backwards.
It's part of a migration to github. I don't know if anything can be done about how github searching works. Unfortunately the older resources cost money to maintain which dom has been paying for years.
The old ressources cost money.
The new ressources cost privacy.
I prefer paying with money (especially for my fun/hobby/private
projects, if it 's worth).
Siggi
PS: Did you think about donations to keep the system up?
There's a few factors beyond money that are issues at the moment. At present the website is pretty much the only thing running on the machine - I migrated all of my email off a couple of years ago. A while back I ran a trial migration of the setup to a container running on my desk. As a result of that the entire rig could be easily migrated to a (mainland) EU based VPS with minimal cost.
However, this is blocked by these mailing lists. In order to pick them on the forum the machine has to be able to send and receive email and most 3rd party VPS suppliers aren't too happy about that. I could setup an account elsewhere to do that, but I'd need to check T&Cs regarding automating sending.
The mailing lists had been quiet for ages (until recently), so I was hoping that they could become retired (blocked to new joiners, and shutdown a few months later). However, circumstances have conspired against that idea!
Another factor is buses. Both literal and metaphorical. I'd like other people to be able to sort out any problems. If everything (as it is at the moment) is in my name then that makes things difficult, using shared resources like GitHub means that we can do this. If I could find somewhere to move the forums too I'd be happy that angle is covered too.
The server that we're running on is also coming to end of life, it's slow and I think the spare motherboard I had for it no longer works.
Moving back to the wiki, I've had a brief scan through the wiki history, I can see that the contributors are pretty much Alvin, Stefano and me. Thus from a privacy aspect as an end-user, I don't think it makes a massive difference that the wiki is now on GitHub since there's no requirement to sign in to view. I also can't guarantee that the connection from Germany to LD4 (where the server is) doesn't have a divert via Cheltenham.
From a contributor perspective, having the wiki on GitHub is a lot easier: I can write offline, make batch changes using command line tools, use standard MarkDown tools to generate documents. And, not have to reset my password every time I want to make a change! Yes, it has some annoyances, but on the whole from my viewpoint it's positive - and given that our documentation is still woeful in places anything to make keeping things up-to-date has to be encouraged.
I hear your complaints about the search, it's a little convoluted (use top bar, get results, click on wiki in the left panel), I've not tried it, but there's a userscript that adds a search box for FireFox here:
https://github.com/linyows/github-wiki-search - I'm guessing you're not really using Chrome?
The move to GitHub for the source code has been positive as well, there's been something like 3000 commits since the move (i.e. from January 2017), to match that number you have to take all the commits from 2011,2012,2013,2014,2015,2016. Likewise there's more 3rd party contributors as well.
I should probably briefly list some of the reasons why we moved most things from SourceForge:
- Too many outages
- Slow infrastructure
- Uncertain future - it was being sold from company to company
- Issue management was so clunky we never actually used it
- Adverts everywhere
Finally money, I'm not looking for any donations at the moment (I'm using the quarterly bill as incentive to do the migration), but I think in future it's something worth considering to truly bus-proof the project.
Regards,
dom