[IAEP] wiki bot

[Bernie Innocenti]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> However, I note that these wiki's in general should be replicatable for
> local access.  In some parts of the world, bandwidth still comes very
> dear.

The fundamentally centralized design is what bothers me the most
about wikis.

Some time ago, I hooked a very simple wiki (600 lines of Python)
to a git backend.  The whole thing is implicitly distributed, if
you ignore the lack of web UI to manage merges.

Mako developed the same idea independently with different
frontend and backend components, and agrees that distributed
operation is mostly an interface problem because the hard
problems are easily solved by a DSCM.

The next version of MoinMoin will come out with a "Sisters Wiki"
feature using a fancy RPC mechanism to synchronize contents.
The description of the "features" of their design made me smile,
especially if you think of what one could do with 3 lines of glue
code and git :-)


> So while I don't think duplication of pages is wise, both wiki's should
> in fact be made easy to replicate; this is very important, in my view.

Wikimedia uses MySQL as a backend.  Develer has a backup/failover
server which runs a MySQL replica server, so I thought I could easily
run at least a read-only instance of Wikimedia on it.  But it turns
out that these things are not supported out of the box.

I wonder how the Wikipedia manages without these things...  The only
solution seems to be using MySQL's cluster engine, with its special
table format and a lot of complexity... but it's quite scary.

Distributing an application as simple as a wiki should be a
non-issue in the 21st century.

-- 
   \___/  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  _| X |  Sugar Labs Team  - http://www.sugarlabs.org/
  \|_O_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"